...will he ever win?

I'll put up something good tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon!

July 31, 2010 08:23 AM

I was in Portland, Oregon for a conference on Visual Communication in June. (Yeah, it’s almost August; yes, I’m that far behind). I just have to post about the whole darn city, it’s so great. Normally in any given town I only find about three shops that truly appeal to me… in Portland, there are whole neighbourhoods filled with them! Indie bookshops, Powell’s Books (the mother of all second hand book shops), vinyl record stores, vintage clothing, antique stores specializing in the weird, artist-run galleries, more artist run galleries, craft and art museums, restaurant patios, and multiple brew pubs. And it’s pretty affordable to be a tourist in, with good public transit, almost as many bicycles as Amsterdam, and cheap eats.

Normally we post on specific artists here on Drawn, but I’m going to praise the whole city, because a supportive city helps the arts flourish – and Portland seems to have done a great job of it. The civic planners and the artists deserve credit. I didn’t get to all the arts districts, but the Alberta Arts District really works well. There, you can find places like Together Gallery, and Monograph Bookwerks, which specializes in fine art books. The photo above MIGHT be from Together’s back area… it had a great selection of zines and other DIY… I didn’t do the greatest job of keeping track what I photographed. Maybe someone can confirm??? I also loved Ampersand Gallery, which has vintage ephemera, art books, and a lot of things related to photography.

If I were American, this is where I would go live and draw….

Below: street art on Alberta Street.

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Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Art, galleries, portland oregon

July 31, 2010 02:55 AM

Alley Oop had the best dinosaur and jungle drawings.No one can forget Catman.Felix and the bulb-noses - a kid favorite.Henry was once beloved by millions. The "Funniest Living American". He doesn't have a mouth. Is he Popeye's bastard son?.Smokey Stover must be the wackiest comic ever. A big influence on Clampett.I love this Oswald drawing!Comics are for everybodyWalt Kelly Snow WhiteDon't you

July 31, 2010 02:55 AM

Yes, every spring the Rangers come out of hibernation to spread their pheromones around the Urals.The garish males perform spectacular displays to impress the blander female of the species.Ranger Horst goes all out, puffing his breast, spreading his feathers and finally extending his perfume bladder which emits a pungent odor - offensive to we civilized folk, but quite pleasant to female Rangers

July 30, 2010 05:12 PM

I pitched it. They laughed. We'll see...PROFESSOR MOLE AND HIS EVIL INSECT BMF THREATEN ARMAGEDDON!THE BRAIN THAT PUNISHED A PLANETThis is Professor Mole's brain. It is packed with dangerous ideas. Moles grow on it in front of our very eyes. They devour his thoughts causing his scalp to tingle with a burning urgency too intense for our puny imaginations to contemplate.This is Professor Mole,

July 30, 2010 02:56 PM

Summer sale on my passion for life book. by clicking the link below will take you to the site.
Click for more information

July 29, 2010 08:27 PM

Actual good printsUncropped!No DVNRNo Line ThinningNo Grain RemovalJust the films as they were meant to be seen

July 29, 2010 05:43 AM

This'll be my last Bette Davis post for a while. I hate to put an end to this, but I think I'm boring everybody. Well, I'll go out with a bang by putting up what has become my favorite Bette/Joan Crawford story.   Here it is, as told by Bette's daughter in her book, "My Mother's Keeper." I think the daughter is about twelve years old here (below). The incident takes place on the set of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?", which as you know, costarred Betty Davis and Joan Crawford, who both hated each other.  Both women took their children to the set with them (click the book pages to enlarge).   Add caption Great story, huh!? Geez, my admiration for Joan Crawford doubled when I read this.  I  tacked on a little of the next paragraph about Joan's boobs because Bette's reaction to them was so funny. On a different topic: a lot of critics consider "All About Eve" (1950) to be the high point of Bette's career. It wasn't, not by a long shot. There are some terrific lines in it, but she doesn't deliver them right. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself. Here's (above) her most famous line: "Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night." See what you think. Did you watch it? Then you see what I mean. Bette's way too restrained. The line calls for style and she reads it like it's just information. I don't entirely blame Bette. I also blame her director friend William Wyler, who's credited with talking her out of her over the top approach to everything. This is a story that requires over the top in some sequences. I also blame Joseph Mankiewicz who wrote and directed the film. Mankiewicz writes great dialogue but he was an inept director in this period. Instead of focusing on Bette the story gives almost equal attention to a host of minor characters. Even the maid, Thelma Ritter, is allowed to upstage Bette. What was Mankiewicz thinking of? He inexplicably downplays the star and lets everybody else go over the top!

July 28, 2010 07:57 AM

Join me at the Flagstaff Film Festival in Arizona, Saturday August 14th!!!A brand new independent film festival.JOHN K. PRESENTS A KIDDIE MATINEE shows from 1:00 - 2:30 PM at the historic Orpheum Theater in downtown Flagstaff, Arizona.I suggested this event because I remembered that when I was a kid, they used to have Saturday matinees with old cartoons, comedy shorts and dinosaur movies. I

July 28, 2010 01:30 AM

OK, I’m back home now from 12 days of ICON followed by San Diego Comic-Con. At both events there was a lot of talk about how 2-D illustration is (once again) “dead”. Previously killed by photography, illustration is now suffering death-by-animation. Or rebirth, as many point out. Naturally, the debate was instigated by Adobe, purveyor of motion-graphics software, and publishers such as WIRED and the NY Times, who are increasingly moving to online and iPad delivery. Graphic media writer Michael Dooley in Print Magazine’s online presence has assembled comments from ICON attendees about it. By the way, the RSS feed on Imprint’s column for illustration is worth subscribing to.

Of course, just as the illustration community is discussing the impending motion-graphics turn as the event of the immediate future, those who have been immersed in it are already sticking it in the museum. You animators might like to submit your work to this exhibition being curated by the Guggenheim:

Developed by YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in collaboration with HP, YouTube Play hopes to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget. …Now through July 31, 2010, participants are invited to submit new or existing videos created within the last two years at youtube.com/play. Submissions may include any form of creative video, including animation, motion graphics, narrative, non-narrative, or documentary work, music videos, and entirely new art forms.

Meanwhile, more illustrators are transitioning into gallery venues with their still images. The photo here is of the exhibition opening at Nucleus Gallery, showing works by attendees at ICON. Is this where illustration art will increasingly go if motion graphics is the medium of the future?

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Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 14 comments
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July 27, 2010 05:22 PM

This is the other Harvey artist that draws the characters in a really appealing style.http://davekarlenoriginalartblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/steve-muffatti-friends-salute-to-unsung.html

July 27, 2010 02:36 PM

Here are some great frame grabs from Clampett cartoons thanks to Chris Lopez. His site is a wonderful resource for cartoon and comic lovers.Daffy in his absolute prime. Look what an appealing design that is!More teeth in Clampett cartoons.Best eyes.Funniest poses- this is McKimson here! He never drew like that in his own cartoons!This is the best cud chewing scene ever animated. Chris..please put

July 27, 2010 06:38 AM

The way I heard it, John Huston was so taken with Bette's over the top rage in "Of Human Bondage," that he was hot to do a film with her which would be one long mad scene.  With "In This Our Life" (1942) (above) he finally got his chance.

The expressions Betty makes in this film are not to be believed.  She must have spent a lot of time in front of mirrors at home, figuring it all out.

You have to admire her for putting so much into a role that made her look evil and crazy.

Bette was a live action cartoon character. I can't believe that no modern animation studio except Spumco ever attempted to use poses like this.

Animation fans talk about Disney's Cruella de Vil as if she were the ultimate example of villainous cartoon acting. She's okay, but she can't hold a candle to Bette (above).  Disney should have pushed Cruella farther.

Here (above) Bette begs a dying old man to help her get out of a crime she committed.  He's only moments away from meeting his maker and can't force himself to pay attention to her.

She's outraged at his self-absorption (above) and gives him a piece of her mind. The last thing he sees on Earth is Bette screaming at him. What a scene!

Oooch! Big mistake (above)! Never slap a crazy person, not unless you want to find arsenic in your morning tea. Look at the way Bette reacts to the slap.

Bette plays crazy so well, that it's hard to resist wondering if she was crazy in real life. I wish I knew. She certainly had a reputation for being hard to get along with.  Her daughter wrote a vitriolic "Mommy Dearest"-type biography, called "My Mother's Keeper" which I'm reading right now, but there's no way of telling if the book is reliable.

That's Olivia de Havilland above. I digress to include her here just to call attention to the number of good manhandling scenes there are in the Huston film. We could do this easily in 2D animation, but you're not likely to see it in computer films. In 3D the polygons would interfere with each other and produce a hideous monster.

Back to Bette acting crazy: Vincent Sherman, the director of my favorite Bette film, "Old Acquaintance," had an interesting story to tell about it.  He said Bette gave him a lot of trouble at the outset of the film but eventually became friendly. Even so he got the feeling that he was walking on eggs, and had to be very careful.  One day, near the end of the project, Bette confided to him that she loved him, and he didn't know how to respond. Soon after her husband (or boyfriend...I can't remember) came to visit Sherman and advised him, for his own good, to be careful, that having an affair with Bette would be like taking a bull by the horns. The implication was that Bette was crazy. The affair never occurred, and Bette and Sherman parted amicably.  Sherman looked forward to working with his old friend on their next film together, "Mr. Skeffington," and was shocked when, with no warning, Bette showed up on the set ready for war, and loudly refused to co-operate with Sherman on absolutely anything.  The entire shooting became a famous disaster. So was Bette crazy? I don't know, but does it matter? If she was crazy we can be grateful that she channeled that craziness into her art, and by doing so redefined film acting.

July 26, 2010 04:06 PM

yeesh

July 26, 2010 01:16 AM

The answer is: Almost none. Almost no ads succeed big on the internet. The truth is, it's a lousy place to advertise. It's kinda sad because advertisers are throwing dollars at the net these days, and they're not going to get most of them back.


Okay: iTunes, ebay, Amazon, porn, airline and hotel booking agents, gambling and dating services are making out like bandits on the net....but, really, who else is? Try to sell detergent or coffee on the net. You can't.

Try asking your friends this question, and see what answers you get: "Can you name an ad for a product you discovered on the net, (but not on Amazon or eBay) that gave you an intense desire to own it?" I bet you'll draw a blank.  Nobody takes internet ads seriously. It's odd because we can all name print and TV ads that had that made us salivate. I'd kill to have TV products like AirHog or a Fushigiball or a bladeless fan. I'll bet my daughter is mulling over Boody Pop right now.



Maybe the net's a bad place to advertise because it's a bad place to tell stories.  Print and TV excel at stories, and the net doesn't.  That's important to know because fiction, or documentary that's structured like fiction, is what drives sales on TV.  You buy Donald Duck Orange Juice because you've grown to like and trust Donald Duck on TV, and you secretly believe that Donald will somehow know you've bought his juice.

 In my opinion advertisers made a big mistake in not supporting print and broadcast media, even when their audiences declined.  The net's not a great place to discover a new product, but it's a killer place to follow up on a desire that's been planted in your head by another medium.

BTW: John K just told me how he would advertise on the net if given the chance, and the ideas were brilliant. That prompts me to amend what I said here to something like,  SO FAR advertising hasn't worked well on the net.

July 25, 2010 05:32 PM

Important pelvic wrinkle mechanics.The way girls' arms bend backwards always baffles me. I'd like to get a cartoon version of this but I'm struggling to figure out how it works. I toned it down too.

July 25, 2010 05:03 AM

Did you know that Canada produced both the world's greatest actor and the greatest supermarket?I was molded by these commercials and there are even earlier and more thrilling Shatner/Loblaws commercials. Are there some Canadian commercial collectors out there? Help educate the world and share our cultural heritage. I'd also love to see the old Dominion commercials too. With the "Mainly because

July 24, 2010 05:29 PM

July 24, 2010 01:06 AM

Honestly, I'm not sure yet.I'm realizing that I use a whole different type of thinking when I copy live humans (or photos of them) than when I draw cartoon characters and I haven't yet figured out how to link the two types of reasoning.Boy I see even more mistakes when I compare the drawings to the photos after I blog them. Like many cartoonists I tend to shrink open spaces when I copy real

July 23, 2010 08:13 AM

I’m really enjoying these paper-cut shadowbox pictures made by UK artist Peter Slight. There are big ones and small ones, and he’s got other goodies in his Flickr portfolio as well.

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Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 7 comments
Tags: Illustration, paper cuts, Peter Slight

July 22, 2010 08:51 PM

Sure, people have funny heads but doesn't the body deserve some ridicule as well?I remember when I was a caricaturist at a theme park during summer break, my caricature boss told me what I was doing wrong: "You aren't drawing the heads big enough. A 'caricature' is when you draw a really big head and a small body. - oh and you take one feature -like the nose, and you make that really big too. -

July 22, 2010 06:35 PM

Where would you rather live? Here (above).........

....or here (above)?

Which is easier on the eye? This (above)..........

....or this (above)?

Listen to my rant against modern architecture on the latest ASIFA Archive podcast, link below: http://www.ahaapodcast.org/  And on another subject.....

Holy Cow! It's time for The San Diego Comic Con!!!!!!!  In a few hours all the LA cartoonists will have migrated to San Diego. Almost none of our ilk will be left in the city. The studios will be dark and empty. Computer screens will flicker aimlessly, and automatic urinals will flush needlessly. Here and there a lonely and unloved curmudgeon will do his miserable work in silence, believing that his absence down South is somehow making a statement.

To everybody else: may you find what you're looking for in San Diego! Good hunting! This blog will resume after the convention, on Sunday night, July 25th!

July 22, 2010 04:42 PM

35mm from Pascal Monaco on Vimeo.

Sarah Biermann, Torsten Strer, Felix Meyer, and Pascal Monaco crammed thirty-five of their favourite movies into this slick 2-minute piece of motion graphics. The animation makes this a refreshing change of pace from the countless “minimalist movie poster” designs littering the Internet these days.

Can you name all thirty-five movies?

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 18 comments
Tags: Animation, movies

July 19, 2010 10:59 PM

sorry I haven't posted anything, but I will catch up in a couple days.

July 19, 2010 06:54 PM

Holy crap are you gonna have fun with these.ONLY AT MY STORE___________________________________________SEE A HEARTACHES STORY HERE

July 17, 2010 05:46 PM

No two people have the same tooth personalities.I've been noticing how important the shape of peoples' teeth are to their individuality. If you don't get the teeth shape right it can lose the likeness.Below is my breakdown of a very famous set of chompers. First I figure out what the whole mess looks like as an overall shape - each person's bar of teeth has its own unique shape. Then I break it

July 16, 2010 05:45 PM

I’m at ICON in LA, and if you’re in the area you really ought to try and get in to one of the events.

At the book table, I was really excited to find this textbook for drawing by Michael Fleishman. As someone who has taught drawing in the past and may do so again in the future, I have to say there are very few textbooks I would recommend. Instructional books have never been terribly exciting – you best learn to draw by drawing, in my opinion, and the old classics like The Natural Way to Draw and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain are still good. But kinda boring.

Fleishman’s book is for illustrators, for a start. Secondly, it isn’t one person’s magic-bullet how-to book. It’s more a compendium of advice from dozens of contemporary illustrators, using their words. Third, there are billions of images in all styles – from the high realism of the cover image (by David Bowers) to the best crudest sketch to the most wacked out stuff. Fourth, although it features work and words from some of the current hottest illustrators, it isn’t limited to them. There’s input here from every kind of illustrator, many of them instructors. While the general flavor is “American” looking, it includes artists from all over the world. Finally, this is the ultimate how-to book for people who hate reading, typeset with lots of headings with text broken up in swallowable amounts, that you can open it at random, scan, and get something out of.

Although it offers the most to those who know the least, I also found it interesting to read what people I know are saying about their own work. Perhaps the most fabulous aspect of the book is that it imparts not just great tips and approaches to drawing, but it communicates a way of life. It has things to say about Fulfillment. For people like us who live and breathe the making of images, and want to learn more or initiate someone else into this life, this is the illustrator’s guide to the galaxy.

UPDATE

There was a request for me to post some shots of the page layouts, so with Michael Fleishman’s input I selected the following:

As you can see, there’s a great balance of images and text, and a variety of images. I especially like the headphone girls there by Yuko Shimizu. And each chapter ends with a summary and ideas for exercises.

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Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 5 comments
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July 16, 2010 02:49 PM

I'm a huge Bette Davis fan, and so are lots of people in the animation industry.  In view of that, it's hard to imagine why her style of acting, or anything remotely similar to it,  never gets into gig studio feature animation. Our industry churns out cartloads of perky, predictable, feminist Cal Arts heroines that nobody cares about. You'd think that in all that clutter somebody would find room for a heroine based on a different model.  Someone more like...well, like Bette.  I thought it might be fun to examine what that style consists of.  It's a big subject, and we won't be able to cover it all in one post, but we can make a start.

Come to think of it, maybe modern actresses would have a hard time doing what Bette did, because her acting style was built around around carefully articulated speech, and not many film actors study that any more.  Bette gives almost every new syllable a different facial expression. I also love the technique (above) called "leading with your eyes," a trick used so often by Davis that it ought to be named after her.

Boy, she really fishes (above) for those those consonants.  She inflates her chest and cranks her head up in order to snatch them from the air.

Davis has great cheeks (above) , that look sunny when she smiles.  Sometimes she plays against type and combines happy cheeks with seedy eyes.

Sometimes she says a whole word or two with her eyes closed.  Dark eyelashes and high, clearly defined eyelashes  on a smooth face help the effect.

Sometimes Bette scans the person she's talking to (above) with her eyes. She carefully studies the wrinkles and buttons on the other person's shirt while they talk. This is a classic scene stealer's trick.

Talking about scene stealing, here's (above) Davis stealing a scene from Mariam Hopkins.  Hopkins does a lot a lot of broad crying here, and no doubt believed she was the center of attention when the scene was shot,  but the scene really belongs to Bette.  She employs an attention-getting stare that vaudevillians called "the fish." Once Davis stole a scene from another actress by unbuttoning her blouse in the shadows behind the woman. Davis played hardball, no doubt about it. Let me make it clear that I'm not criticizing her for this. She honed scene stealing into an effective style, and backed it up with virtuoso acting. I wouldn't have wanted her to change a thing.

Davis (above)must have spent a lot of time infront of a mirror, getting the character right.

She could make faces that were unique and unforgettable, like the one above.  Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words....

Ditto.

July 16, 2010 08:01 AM

How teeth shapes affect someone's specific appearance

July 16, 2010 01:04 AM

July 15, 2010 03:30 PM

A couple of days ago I visited Steve Worth and he let me play with his new, fully-loaded iPad. To say I was impressed would be an understatement.  More than ever I'm convinced that this device is a true game changer, and not just an expensive toy.  Buy one and you may never use your laptop again.

To begin with, this thing is FUN to use. Navigating with it is like working a video game controller. You use your thumbs a lot, and you end up moving the machine all over the place, at least I did.  I'll come back to this in a minute.















The negatives? Let's see.....it was a little heavier than expected, but you get used to that.  A number of important places to tap weren't marked, but you get used to that, too. The scrolling overshot a bit. I forgot to test it on a Flash film,  but I watched part of Clampett's "Tortoise Wins by a Hare," and it was gorgeous. I couldn't find a still frame mode, but the paused frames were rock steady. The resolution was superb, far superior to the one on the laptop that was in the room.

















The fun aspect of the device is difficult to exaggerate.  Using it is an intense experience. You get a lot accomplished in a short amount of time, and have a ton of fun doing it. You have so much fun that it's a bit exhausting, and after a while you're ready to put it down and do things in the real world. Isn't that wonderful!? If you have a computer addiction, this might be the cure.




I wonder what changes this new medium will bring? Every new medium favors a new type of content. What will look horrible on iPad that currently looks good on desktops? My own  blog for one thing. I hate to admit it, but this blog sucks on the new machine. It looks fine on my widescreen desktop where there's plenty of room for sidebars, but it gets clobbered on the pad. Good Grief! Am I doomed to end up on the trash heap of history!?

Oh, one more thing...just a small item, nothing important.......nothing except: SKETCHBOOK PRO IS AVAILABLE AS AN APP...AND IT COSTS ONLY EIGHT FREAKING DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And (possibly) no need to own a cintiq....with a stylus the iPad may serve as a cintiq! Can you imagine that? GOOD LORD! STEVE JOBS IS A MIRACLE WORKER! BTW: I have no experience with the Sketchbook Pro app, so I haven't personally seen the iPad function as a cintiq. This is how it was described by an article on the net, and I pass it on to you. Buyer beware!

July 15, 2010 01:33 PM

Ron Ferdinand sent me these nice high rez scans of original Dennis pages, so I thought I'd share 'em.

July 14, 2010 03:54 PM

As has been pointed out and acknowledged, Warren Kremer created the Harvey comics house style that the other cartoonists followed. This makes it a bit hard to tell the different artists apart. All the main characters are basically the same design. Little Audrey is Casper with ears and clothes and hair. One way to tell the different artists apart is to look at the incidental characters in the

July 13, 2010 03:09 PM

It must have been a fun job to write the copy for the ads in comic books. I sometimes wonder if they knew who the audience for comic books was.Who are your favorite principal characters in Looney Tunes?Can you imagine your kids comparing their grand comic tales with each other?This copy really speaks in a vernacular every child can identify with.

July 13, 2010 02:59 PM

July 12, 2010 09:14 PM

INT. FRAME SHOP: AT THE COUNTER. A customer (BILL) talks on his cel phone while he waits for the proprietor.  BILL (ON HIS CEL PHONE): "Yeah, you're not going to believe what happened! I found the perfect frame for that piece. It's green and looks like laminated cow skin. The only problem was the price: $300! That's more than I paid for the artwork! Anyway, the clerk orders it for me, and I put half the money down. No, wait! There's more! I walk across the street and, lo and behold, I find another store that sells the same frame for half the price.  I couldn't believe it! Half the price! So I run back to the original store to get my money back, only it occurs to me that they might not want to give it to me, so I make up a story. You're going to die when you hear it! It's brilliant! It should be in the Museum of Excuse Stories. Wait a minute....here comes the guy who runs the place. I gotta go!" He pockets the phone.  PROPRIETOR: "Hey! You just bought a frame. Don't tell me you want another one  already!" BILL: "Well, not exactly. See, what happened is...I got a parking ticket while I was in here. It's expensive, so...I hate to say it...I won't be able to buy the frame I was going to buy. I just can't afford it now." PROPRIETOR: "Geez, that's too bad! It was a nice frame." BILL: "Yeah. It's turning out to be one of those days." PROPRIETOR: "How much was it for? BILL: "How much was what for?" PROPRIETOR: "The ticket. How much was it for?" BILL: "Oh yeah, the ticket...it was, um...Three hundred dollars." PROPRIETOR: "THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS!!!??" It's not supposed to be $300 here! This is Santa Monica. Two hundred and fifty is what you get for a ticket here!" BILL: "Well, I could be mis..." PROPRIETOR: "Let me ask my partner. DAVE,  COME OUT HERE FOR A MINUTE!" DAVE comes out with a big roll of plastic in his arms. He puts it down.  DAVE: "Bubble wrap. I'm making a place for it in the back. What can I do you for?" PROPRIETOR: "It's not for me, it's for him. This guy just got a parking ticket for 300 bucks." DAVE: "THREE HUNDRED BUCKS!!??? It's never three hundred in Santa Monica! It's 250! Everybody knows that! Do you know what that means?" BILL: "Wait a minute, if you're trying to imply that I'm..." DAVE (TO THE PROPRIETOR): "That means fifty bucks for the cop!" PROPRIETOR: "Yep, fifty bucks! If he does 10 of those in a day, that's $500 a day." DAVE: "$2,500 a week!" PROPRIETOR: (on a calculator) "$125,000 a year! That's a felony!" BILL: "Well, I..." DAVE: "Man, I hate to hear stuff like this! It really eats at me, ya know? It just tears my guts out! One dirty cop ruins it for everybody! Santa Monica's a good town, and it deserves better than this. I'm gonna take this up with the city council!" BILL: "Well, there's no use bothering the city councilmen..." DAVE: "Whaddaya mean? I AM A CITY COUNCILMAN! Lemme see the ticket." BILL: "The ticket?" DAVE, PROPRIETOR (TOGETHER): "The ticket!" BILL: "Well...well...er...um, the cop took it away. I just gave him a check." PROPRIETOR: "What!!?? A check???  He took a CHECK from you???"" DAVE: "Whoa! Hold on! He's not supposed to take a check from you. He's not supposed to handle any money at all! Geeeez! This is big! The police here get federal money. That means the F.B.I.'s gonna get involved!"  PROPRIETOR: "Congress, maybe! People are gonna get sent up for this!" He reaches for the phone.  BILL: "What are you doing!?"  PROPRIETOR: "I'm gonna call the police." BILL (MORTIFIED):  "No, no, wait!...put the phone down...just put the phone down!" PROPRIETOR: "Wha...?" BILL: "I um...well, I might as well just...spit it out.  I, uh.... I found a place across the street that sells the same frame for half the price. You charge $300 and they charge 150 for the same thing. I... just...wanted...to........to.... get-the-money-back-so-I-could-buy-it-from-them-instead.  There, I said it." AN AWKWARD MOMENT as all three stare at the floor in silence, then.... DAVE: "I gotta put this bubble wrap away!" DAVE EXITS. PROPRIETOR: "Aw, that wasn't nice." BILL: "Look, I'm really sorry. Tell you what. I'll still take the frame from you. I gave you half before,  and I'll pay you the rest now. You don't have to wait til the order comes in. It's the least I can do. " PROPRIETOR: "Alright. I'll write up a receipt......Here."  BILL: "Wait a minute! This for a hundred dollars extra. It says here that you're giving me gold wire and platinum nails. I didn't ask for that!" PROPRIETOR (LOOKS BILL IN THE EYE): "Sure you did." DAVE (AFTER A BEAT, RESIGNED): "(sigh!) Sure I did." BILL, broken, exits the store. Just as he does,  a nervous woman enters. WOMAN (TO PROPRIETOR): "Um, I was in here a little while ago and ordered a frame. I hate to ask for this, but I need my down payment back. The doctor just said that my poor mother is sick. We'll need the money for medicine." PROPRIETOR: "Gee, that's a shame. What kind of sickness does she have?" WOMAN: "What kind? Um...er...um, rheumatism." PROPRIETOR: "Rheumatism!!!?? Nobody throws up over rheumatism! Who is this doctor? Who did he tell you he was? Maybe he's a not a real doctor! I hate to see people get cheated! Let me ask my partner about this. DAVE, CAN YOU COME OUT HERE FOR A MINUTE!!???" FADE OUT. THE END The play is copyright 2010 by Eddie Fitzgerald. Anyone can use it for non-commercial purposes without asking, as long as the authorship is attached.

July 12, 2010 06:49 AM

10" x 10" x .25"
Watercolor and fancy papers and cake disks and gold paint and glue.

For sale on Etsy.

I documented the process over on my regular journal (EDIT: link fixed!), if you wanna see how this was made and some detail shots. Comments disabled here due to cross-posting between here and my other journal.

July 11, 2010 06:06 PM

This is the photo that inspired the first drawings of Ren.I thought it was funny to see a psychotic chihuahua in a cute sweater and I imagined him doing everything possible to get it off.I also imagined his master putting him outside where the bigger bully dogs would make fun of him.These aren't the first drawings of him, but they were based on my initial doodles. I do have some very early

July 11, 2010 05:45 PM

Aaaargh! It's a tiny, miniature play written just for this blog! I started it last night and was too sleepy to finish it.  I'll do the rest when I get up tomorrow (Sunday).   What's it about? It's a searing drama...a cry for help, and a cry of passion. It's deeper than deep. It's all about seedy underbellies and truths never before revealed. It's lurid and lusty...full of anguish and gusto. It's ripped out of tomorrow's headlines!  It's...well, see for yourself!

July 11, 2010 08:29 AM

I wonder who decided to make Mickey flesh colored? Do you think there was a meeting where they debated it hotly? They must have thought that the new colors would be more identifiable to Arians.I like both these cartoons a lot because they look so great. ...and I love the way they move. The style is so different from how we animate today. Much more experimental and tailored to the ideas.Here's how

July 10, 2010 05:52 PM

July 10, 2010 01:27 AM

Here are the preview images for the Amulet 3 and Copper banners that we'll have at the Flight booth in San Diego (#2235)

July 10, 2010 01:22 AM

“TACK’S CARTOON TIPS have been pepared for the purpose of aiding those desirous of entering the field of Comic art. I have used these “Tips” in my personal instruction classes with marked success”

From a Flickr slideshow / scan of B. “Tack” Knight’s 1923 instructional book on cartooning.

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Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 13 comments
Tags: Cartooning, Comics, How-To, tips

July 09, 2010 04:37 PM

Remember this picture (above)? I put it up a week ago to illustrate the point that Wally Wood certainly loved his Ikea furniture. I kinda like it too. Thanks to Ikea, anybody can have a 50s bachelor pad at a reasonable price.  Anyway, I thought the picture above deserved a second look. It reminds me that the young and struggling Wood was probably pretty dependant on his magazine reference. Before he worked on Mad, Wood shared an office with realistic artists Frazetta and Williamson, and was under a lot of pressure to improve his realistic drawing quickly.

For interior backgrounds Wood seemed to prefer reference that that emphasized perspective and the blocky nature of furniture. My guess is that he chose these because he was insecure about his use of perspective and found the clarity and simplicity of these mathematical pictures to be helpful.  I like to think that somewhere along the line it dawned on him that the simple perspectives he was using were funny. Maybe he began to laugh at his own pictures. Maybe after a point he decided that competing with Williamson and Frazetta for realism was pointless, and he broke out into pure style.

You could argue that his handling of human characters evolved the same way. At first Wood relied heavily on magazine reference. The girl above strikes a fashion magazine pose when she points her gun.  Look at her legs and feet. That's an odd way to stand when you're supposed to be in the throws of murderous passion.  Eventually Wood would transcend this too obvious use of reference, but a lot of people believe he did uniquely interesting work in this period, when he had a foot in both worlds, and was making a transition to something more stylized.  The reference anchored him, made his work more complex. The space patrol girl is funny in her model pose, but she's also dignified, confident, and iconic. Her contradictions make her a puzzle that we enjoy trying to solve. And it all takes place in a bizarre bachelor pad full of obsessively blocky shapes.  A Could this (above) have been the magazine ad that Wood referenced?   The legs are the same, so is the hair style...sort of.  The model's also off balance, just like the space girl in Wood's picture.  Anyway, this is what I'm arguing here: that first out of necessity, then by choice, Wood thrust Pepsi Generation models into outer space to encounter hideous monsters.

July 09, 2010 09:32 AM

Remind me to tell you my stories about hanging out with Michael sometime.

July 09, 2010 05:30 AM

July 09, 2010 12:25 AM

I'm fascinated by this girl's head. There are so many interesting departures from the ideal generic head shape that I'm having trouble figuring out which feature to focus on.Every time I do something to one, it knocks another out of place.It seems like there is a black hole in the center of her face that is sucking all the features towards the middle. That is very hard for me to capture.I still

July 08, 2010 05:22 PM

From 1997, an early tribute I did in honor of the UFC.When I first turned in this scene to CN, they wanted me to cut it because they thought Yogi and Ranger Smith were having "relations". I explained that, no, this was an MMA style of fighting popularized by first, Royce Gracie's Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and then built upon by Mark "the Hammer" Coleman's "Ground and Pound" combination of wrestling

July 08, 2010 03:20 AM

http://116.ufc.com/Ultimate Fighting Championship MY UFC COMMERCIAL WHEN IT WAS BANNED FROM CABLEwatch the big boys crash skulls!MORE UFC STARS!

July 07, 2010 08:02 PM

July 07, 2010 12:16 PM

Here is the dissected anatomy of a tree shaft - it's made of subordinate tubes that cling together to make the bigger form.Here are some good and rude trees to practice hierarchy on.2 CONTRASTING URGES MAKE THE TREE'S FORMHere the sub tubes are wrenched apart. The feeling I get from the form of trees is that they are constructed out of opposing forces. One major force is trying to hold all the

July 06, 2010 09:10 PM

Howie's details - like the leaves and bark on the trees are swell, but they are subservient to the larger shapes in the composition. Post makes sure he arranges the biggest shapes in relationship to each other first: Tree, sky house, character, ground - all these balance really nicely against each other. Once he has that balance, he wraps the details around the larger shapes.In that big fat solid

July 06, 2010 05:47 PM

I was about to post something else when I discovered these pictures of the young Ward Kimball and his wife Betty on  Cartoon Brew.  I immediately put my own post aside, so I could put these up instead.  They're just too good to get anything less than the widest possible attention.  As I said, the picture above is of animator Ward Kimball and his wife Betty.  Betty recently died at age 97. I don't know if I've ever seen a photo which so perfectly conveys young love.  The two seem so right for each other, so serene in each other's company.  If Eisenstadt or some other famous photographer had taken it, it would find its way onto the walls of a major museum.  Since it's a personal, family photo I don't know what its fate will be.

Above, a beautiful sketch, which also conveys the feeling the  two had for each other.  What a powerful medium pencil and paper is when it's in the right hands!

Ward did this sketch (above) of Betty sleeping. Very nice! I wish I could have met her when she was alive!  I'm glad the two had each other. Thanks to Amid for putting up the pictures I swiped.  You can see the whole set at Cartoon Brew, July 4th entry: http://www.cartoonbrew.com

July 06, 2010 04:57 PM

Over on his Flickr account, Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley shares an interesting look at how the flow of panels his comics has improved from earlier volumes.

Take this page from Book 3:

And compare to one from Book 5:

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 7 comments
Tags: Bryan Lee O'Malley, Comics, Scott Pilgrim

July 06, 2010 02:43 PM

July 06, 2010 03:13 AM

I stumbled onto Ginette Lapalme’s Flickr account by way of Michael DeForge on Twitter. I love the playful experimental nature of these watercolour sketches.

Even more, I love these painted sticks:

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: Ginette Lapalme, Illustration, watercolour

July 05, 2010 10:52 PM

A lot of artists keep "swipe files" for reference. Kirby and Wood used to talk about it. No one knows what everything looks like and an organized swipe file of photos and other artists' interpretations of things is handy reference.I am not good at drawing backgrounds or coming up with interesting camera angles. Howie Post is a great reference for me. He has already done all the work of studying

July 05, 2010 06:21 PM

Yes! Brian Taylor has released the last in his series of six letterpress prints, Bumtown Bruiser. The universe of Brian’s Candykiller universe is one born out of 1920’s Fleischer animation, EC horror comics, and everything in-between.

Here’s the full set of prints:

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 4 comments
Tags: brian taylor, prints

July 05, 2010 06:01 PM

July 04, 2010 08:00 PM

Ron Ferdinand sent me this beautiful page celebrating freedom's birthday.

July 04, 2010 05:55 PM

Boy, drawing 3 dimensional cartoon toys is enough of a challenge. People ask me all the time whether I think life drawing is useful to cartoonists and animators and my answer is a hesitant - yes. Under certain conditions.the shapes in real life are so much more intricate than 2 dimensional cartoon characters that the gap between the 2 is immense. It's very hard to bridge the 2 disciplines in

July 04, 2010 05:19 PM

This (above) is a short video I made a couple of years ago to express what I felt about the Fourth of July. I considered  remaking it, but after watching it again I concluded that I'm not likely to improve on it,  so here it is, in all its 2008 glory.



While I'm at it, I'll throw in this nifty opening title from HBO's John Adams series.



Last, but not least, here's (above) a brief excerpt from that series where John Adams publicly commits to the ideal of liberty. I always get misty-eyed over stuff like this.

Have a good Fourth everybody!

July 04, 2010 05:19 PM

More terrific photos from the Cassini orbiter! I still can't believe that it's possible to see the surface of a moon circling far away Saturn. Here's (above) a giant crater on Mimas. Be sure to click to enlarge all of the photos in this post.

Above, another moon of Saturn,  a small one called Phoebe. Maybe it's a captured comet.

No doubt everybody here is familiar with the Horsehead Nebula. I thought you'd like to see it in context, framed by a ring of gas.  The horsehead is the backlit, little chess piece in the upper middle of the picture.

This (above) is M66, one of the closest galaxies. It's a lot more impressive when seen large.

This is a detail of the edge of a another nearby galaxy.  Enlargement is a must. Above, the Rosette Nebula. Above, the stunningly beautiful Great Nebula in Orion. The Itokawa Asteroid...and it has no craters! What gives!? It must have been recently formed. And what are all those pimple boulders doing there?

July 04, 2010 05:01 PM

http://www.dennisthemenace.com/ronferdinand.htmlRon Ferdinand has been drawing Hank Ketcham's Dennis sunday pages for years and I asked him he would be willing to share some memories and their working process.001 I had taken the family to Disneyland and this was on my drawing table when I returned to work.a) Working with KetchamWhen did you first start working for Ketcham and what were the

July 03, 2010 05:13 PM

July 03, 2010 04:10 PM

July 02, 2010 09:14 PM

I like the look of this transitional period of Disney's. It's between the pure rubber hose cartoons of the early 30s and the feature style that eventually abandoned early cartoon sensibility altogether.Disney was still taking advantage of cartoony motion in this period. The design of the characters was changing slightly to accommodate the new techniques of motion that the animators were

July 02, 2010 06:09 PM

Color, layout, scene planning, camerawork, special effects and music - and more important than any of those individual elements is the hierarchical coordination of them all.the cutesy character stuff kind of gets in the way of the atmosphere, but I guess you gotta put something in there for the Moms and pantywaists in the audience.My favorite parts of classic Disney movies are the sequences that

July 02, 2010 04:33 PM

It's easier to caricature someone who isn't a professional model.Trying to figure out how the body works under all those lumpy clothes is a problem.More lumpy clothes but a good head to draw.These caricatures are still conservative because I am drawing the people for the first time and only from one angle.Whoops, I see I got lazy and drew at an angle instead of looking straight at the paper.

July 02, 2010 02:30 AM

Warm up 1: Bland slow Filmation style realistic study.2: Still stiff, but the drawing on the right is starting to loosen up3: 1st drawing to begin to approach what I am striving for4: Starting to get there, but I see lots of mistakes when I compare the drawings to the photos this wayDrawing real humans is a lot harder than drawing cartoon characters out of simple shapes (like that's not obvious)

July 01, 2010 10:00 PM

While his Guardian strip is on hiatus, Tom Gauld is doing a weekly comic over on Flickr. Fantastic news!

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Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: comic, Tom Gauld

June 30, 2010 11:57 PM

"What led to the 60's?" you ask. Good question. Well, there's Vietnam, the pill, drugs, civil rights...you name it. These are the standard explanations, and they're all important, but we all know there's gotta be more than that. You don't go from Ozzie and Harriet to bare-breasted at Woodstock in just a few years unless you have a lot of history pushing at your back.

What that history is, I don't know. I thought I might free-associate a little here, just to see what other explanations I could come up with. I've tried this before and what I came up with was woefully inadequate, but maybe I'll do better this time. Here goes.......

Well, there was TV. In the 50s and early 60s adults hadn't become addicted to it yet, but kids watched a ton of it.  Most of the dramas were clear-cut, good guy vs. bad guy stuff. The situation comedies and H&B cartoons were mind-numbingly stupid. My guess is that TV kids of this era...the future hippies... grew up idealistic under the influence of the dramas, but filled with a revulsion for ordinary life the way it was portrayed on the sitcoms.

Then there was the fact that lots of late 50s kids had allowances, something only rich kids had in the 19th Century. With money to spend they developed a youth culture built around the things they liked to buy, like records.

Talking about the 19th century, let me digress for a minute to take note of the Romanticism of that era, with its emphasis on the mysterious workings of the inner mind. That idea spilled over into the 20th Century, carried there by people like Freud and Ibsen and the Surrealists.  Marxism was carried over too, only it was modified by the romantics who absorbed it and gave it a different flavor.

One result of the Marxist-Romantic synthesis was fascism.  For decades central Europeans lived under fascist or communist governments which which portrayed America in the worst light possible.  Amazingly, a lot of pre-hippies picked up on this view of ourselves and believed it.

That's the young Paul Newman (above) at the Actors' Studio in New York.  Ibsen's theories, which emphasized character conflict and the need to bring the mysterious inner  life to the surface, ruled at that studio.  Stories favored by this school were always about sensitive people who were damaged or made insane by the irrational demands of normal society. That seems like an odd theme to dwell on exclusively, but actors liked these stories because they were full of emotional fireworks, and seemed kind of edgy because normal society was always the villain.   If you lived at that time, and were destined to be a hippie, you saw and read a LOT of stories where normal people were the bad guys.

One of the most influential people of the early 60s was Alvin Toffler, who's almost forgotten now.  He wrote futurist books which predicted a right-around-the-corner society where machines made possible a twenty hour work week and an overabundance of cheap food and material possessions. Our only problem would be what to do with the spare time.  Toffler's important because an awful, awful lot of people...including future hippies... believed what he said, and concluded that...Damn!...if unlimited wealth was right around the corner, then we should loose the work ethic, have a party, and redistribute everything. With so much to go around, it would be positively stingy to do anything else.

Toffler's book sold big in cheap paperbacks, which was the only kind of book most young people could afford to buy.  The innovative publishers who pioneered the paperback revolution were mostly left-inclined, so the books that young people read were usually limited to that point of view (Salinger isn't overtly left in this book, I just liked the picture).

Hmmmm.....anything else? No, I guess that's it.  In spite of all I just said I don't think Romanticism, left-leaning records, paperbacks and movies, or any of the standard explanations really add up to what we saw in the 60s.  I told you I didn't understand where the 60s came from, and I don't. Maybe there was something else, something more off the wall.  Maybe miniskirts (above) were to blame. I mean, they make a powerful visual argument for the rightness of something or other.

Maybe after the miniskirt there was no turning back. No matter how destructive the new sensibility might turn out to be, a return to the society that covered up legs was unthinkable.

No wonder the hippie philosophy spread so fast. Imagine that you were a  file clerk in an insurance company in 1964, and had an abusive boss. There he is behind you telling you what a good-for-nothing you are, and your eyes happen to wander over to the poster above, which is on the wall.  How inviting it would be to drop everything and follow the girl with the guitar!

June 30, 2010 05:51 PM

It's hard to believe how high the standards in popular arts were just a few decades ago.Top Tier CartooningGreat IllustrationSomeone Who Can Do BothA Hilarious CombinationGreat Cartooning, Draftsmanship and Design CombinedThese all came from one generous blogger.http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/

June 30, 2010 04:28 PM

Watch in awe as David Kassan paints with an iPad.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 14 comments
Tags: iPad

June 30, 2010 03:03 PM

My "realistic" drawings are about as bland as bland can be. I'm ready for when Filmation starts up again. My goal is not to learn to draw realistically, but to understand why things look a certain way in general logical terms so I can then simplify and cartoon them.I gave myself a double problem with these studies. I want to add some hairstyles to my pretty girl palette and am using a Japanese

June 29, 2010 07:16 PM

What started off as a fun drawing challenge between artists Stacy Curtis and Guy Francis has now become a very popular creative blog where other illustrators are now encouraged to take part in the Dueling Banjo Pigs Project.  Artists like Ted Dawson, Dan Thompson, Rick Kirkman, Mike Lester, Mike Lynch, and Paula J. Becker have all contributed delightful piggy illustrations.

So get in on the piggy banjo act and send in your drawing, too! Sqeeeeeee!!

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Posted by Patricia Storms on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags:

June 29, 2010 05:14 PM

There’s too much news lately about disasters – it’s time to celebrate perseverance and the ability to be fruitful and multiply! These eight (yes: seven plus one!) letterpress prints feature art about gathering, joining together, and swarms! Also: teaming up – each of the prints in the newest set from the Cloudy Collection was designed by an amazing artist duo! Teeming Up! includes art by Aesthetic Apparatus, Always With Honor, Eight Hour Day, Ghostshrimp + Pendleton Ward, The Little Friends of Printmaking, Lab Partners, Sonnenzimmer, and Becky & Frank. .

Eight prints for $35? You’re welcome.

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Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: Aesthetic Apparatus, Always With Honor, Becky & Frank, Cloudy Collection, Eight Hour Day, Ghostshrimp, Lab Partners, letterpress, Pen Ward, prints, Sonnenzimmer, The Little Friends of Printmaking

June 29, 2010 04:05 PM

Here's some excellent "illustrative art" to contrast with all the great cartoony art I admire.I don't know who this is exactly. I just stumbled on his work through links at commenters' blogs.I love his compositions, his poses, his design sense - and especially his trees. He has a nice combination of style and observation.I'd say this is draftsmanship on a much higher level than what most

June 29, 2010 03:00 PM

WARNING: Nothing obscene here, but this post is not office or school safe.

In the era of the dinosaurs (above), most young women ran around naked. That's okay. I'm sure nobody complained. In those days, even middle-aged women were probably pretty slim and athletic.

Not so for modern city women (above). They tend to put on weight pretty early in life. So do modern men, but this post isn't about them.

Most modern women will eventually develop a pear shape, like Rembrandt's wife in the drawing above.

Instead of developing a gut like middle-aged men do, they develop a thickening of the entire middle of the body.  Oddly, the upper torso remains relatively thin, at least for a while. Why is this so interesting? Because this shape puts enormous emphasis on the the genital region...it makes it the unmistakable center of interest. The whole body becomes a wide, diamond-shaped target with a huge patch of pubic hair in the center. When you consider that women reach their sexual peak at the same age they take this shape, then the only conclusion to draw is that nature desperately wants to advertise women's sexuality at this age. Why? I don't know.

After a bit the upper torso expands as well, creating a sort of vertical barbell shape. This (above) is a pretty extreme example, but you know what I mean. The genital region is no longer the center of interest, though sex characteristics are still obvious until old age sets in.

I forgot to say that after the hips and thighs begin to expand, the abdomen begins to stretch out (above). Within reason that's sexy, at least I think so.  Boy, nature desperately wants women to stay sexy, even in the 30 - 45 year old range. Maybe older. Nothing subtle here. When the blush of youth wears off, nature rolls up its sleeves and resorts to the hard sell, hawking a woman's sex potential with a bullhorn and billboards. Interesting, huh?   Aren't you glad you read Theory Corner? What other art site is so doggoned scientific?  BTW: I'm aware that dinosaurs and humans never existed at the same time.

June 29, 2010 06:07 AM

SKYplay is a photoset that takes spotting shapes in clouds to the next level. These playful and creative photos are the work of Horst J. Bernhart who passed away in May this year.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 3 comments
Tags: Creative Thinking, Photography

June 29, 2010 12:53 AM

So, this is really four pieces of news all in one post. First, Maurice Vellekoop finally has a website! He’s one of my all-time favourites, and I’m delighted to see he finally has a presence online (it’s probably hearsay, but a friend of a friend of a friend of Maurice’s once told me several years ago he wasn’t fond of the internet and had resisted having a site. See, now I’m just spreading rumours! Don’t repeat a word of this!).

Second: he’s also started a blog this year. Don’t miss this scans of the Polaroids he took when covering an event for Vogue back in 1994.

Third (seemingly unrelated, but stick with me): Anita Kunz, another favourite illustrator, also started a blog two years ago, and embarrassed to say I’m just finding it now.

But wait, it gets better! Anita and Maurice are having an art show together in Toronto in two days! TWO DAYS FROM TODAY! It’s killing me to know that I will miss this. Mind you, if I did attend and managed to work up the nerve to speak to either of them, I’d doubtless blurt out something idiotic, alienate myself as a weirdo fanboy, and possibly spill wine on them.

It’s called The Naughty Show (personally, I’d have pushed for VelleKunz, but that’s just me) and will feature over a hundred nudes by Kunz, and originals from Vellekoop’s newest pinup book.

Details for you lucky folks who can make it:
ONE800 Gallery, 800 Dundas Street West, Toronto — June 30: 7:00 – 9:00

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Posted by Luc Latulippe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: anita kunz, art show, Events, Illustration, Maurice Vellekoop, toronto

June 28, 2010 10:20 PM

Boy, talk about "Man Cartoonists". Jim Tyer is the definition of one. This guy had the power to shoot his pure funny thoughts straight from his brain through his pencil to hit the paper unfiltered by preconceived rules, model sheets or second-guessing. He just drew what he felt - and he felt that kids deserved fun.That's kind of how I draw storyboards, but I always intend to "fix" things later in

June 28, 2010 05:35 PM

Jim Tyer is every kid's best friend...you'll see.

June 28, 2010 04:44 PM

I have a real soft spot for old printing and type specimen books, so I adore the beautiful scans over at BibliOdyssey of a German printer’s book called Schrift- und Polytypen-Proben (Fonts and examples of different type).

Follow the trail of links and you’ll discover a treasure of type, engravings, and flourishes to inspire your next ornamental illustration project.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: Design, ephemera, Typography

June 28, 2010 04:12 PM

Scampd is a new blog/showcase devoted to celebrating contemporary advertising illustration. From the site:

For a time, we silently bore witness as advertising award shows and design annuals killed off their once glorious illustration categories. But enough is enough, and we have decided to do something about it.

Illustrators, art directors, and agencies are invited to submit their work to be featured.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: advertising, Illustration

June 28, 2010 04:06 PM

More stiff caricaturesThese hotties would surely make Disney fans swoon in cartoon form.That Taylor girl really does have an interesting head, but I haven't quite nabbed it yet. It might be too unique for animation, though.Since anmated fairytales are in dire need of new designs for the lead romantic characters I thought I'd work on some. I am basing them on live action celebrities with proven

June 27, 2010 05:46 PM

The pixel-kings of isometry, eBoy have released this tilting iPhone game. You can try the game on this site if you don’t have an iPhone or any of that other hardware.

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Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: eboy, games, iphone, Pixel Art

June 26, 2010 10:40 PM

So great. Plucked from an old Pogo comic book, here’s Walt Kelly’s Albert Alligator reciting Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Comics, Lewis Carroll, Walt Kelly

June 26, 2010 10:24 PM

It's on Showtime (or one of your sports channels) for only $25.If you haven't seen Fedor yet, you're in for a treat! He is a fighter/scientist with no emotion. He just analyzes his opponent while taking a few punches and kicks and then he destroys him with efficiency.Support manliness!Fedor's Cartoon Drawings:

June 26, 2010 05:32 PM

In my insatiable search for illustrations for my posts, I often find images that I'm dying to share but haven't yet found room in a particular post for.Here are some of these magnificent treasures that speak more than words could say...UNDERWEAR GOD: "I better go arrest that lady for indecent exposure! I don't care if she is the first girl the Lord made. I'M the new God around here!"You can

June 26, 2010 05:00 PM

I thought I better warm up with some real men in case my Emo studies affect me somehow.I love UFC and have sen all these guys fight many times, but it didn't help me today.These are all super stiff and didn't capture their souls.It's probably better to draw them in action or still frame them.I wonder why you never see animated features with manly male heroes like these?Ugh. I gave up on the men

June 25, 2010 07:12 PM

I haven't done caricatures in awhile, so I thought I'd warm up by doing some of the current teen heart throbs.Because you never know when Jeffrey might call me in to design the latest romantic emos for a picture.As you can see, I'm out of practice.I don't really know who these people are, but they certainly have interesting heads.I love this head. I have been fascinated with it for some time

June 25, 2010 01:38 AM

I strongly recommend to every growing cartoonist to do warm up exercises every day. Athletes warm up before stressing their stiff joints, musicians practice their scales every day before jumping right into their performances and I think cartoonists can benefit from limbering up their pencils and brains before they attack their work. I should follow this advice and I did this morning.PRACTICE THE

June 25, 2010 12:50 AM

June 24, 2010 07:41 PM

Like everybody else I get compliments occasionally, and like everybody else I take them with a grain of salt...at least I usually do.  For some reason, every once in a while,  a compliment gets past my guard and I regard it as a cosmic truth, a titanic affirmation that something about me is worthy of sitting in a jeweled box at the top of a golden tower studded with elephant tusks.  I have just received such a compliment. and I will now, with shameless immodesty, share it with you......  A couple of days ago John K remarked in a blog post on Jimmy Hatlo, that I was the last "man" cartoonist he could think of. That's "man," not "manly," which is probably a superior rank, but I'll take the compliment anyway. Imagine that. The last one. After me a whole species dies. Think of it.

Yes, according to John I'm The Last of the Mohicans (above).  I think the "man" reference has something to do with my life experience being in what I draw. Geez. He's obviously being much too generous, and everyone reading this will have a long list of much more qualified candidates, but I refuse to let truth get in the way.  I expect everybody who visits here to wipe their feet first, and wear a surgical mask lest germs reach the precious throat of this last of his species.

I'm toying with the idea of doing a Sunday Comics page. Maybe something every other Sunday. I don't have any ideas, and I'm not sure that I know how to color and ink in Photoshop, so I might have to use crayons. Let me think about it. Whatever it is will probably look horrible, but I feel a responsibility to at least make an effort...I mean, being the last man cartoonist and all.

June 24, 2010 04:06 PM

Who was more manly?Next...

June 24, 2010 06:53 AM

The FLIGHT 7 preview is now online.  I think it's a very strong volume, with some of the most beautiful artwork we've ever had in the pages of Flight.  The book arrives in stores mid-July and we will be attending Comic-Con to sell and sign copies of all Flight volumes. We'll also have Copper, Amulet 1 & 2, Raina Telgemeier's Smile and Jake Parker's Missile Mouse.  Our booth is #2235, and we will be sharing the space with our friends at Gallery Nucleus once again.  This will likely be the last Comic-Con where we will have a large booth presence for Flight, so be sure to drop by and say hello.  Next year, I'll only be at the show for a day or two and probably take Juni to the San Diego Zoo and Sea World.

June 24, 2010 02:16 AM

I have always been fascinated by "animation hair". (meaning hair styles in animated cartoons from 1980 and likely into the next couple centuries) You probably have too. If you ever met anyone in real life who had animation hair, your first instinct would be to beat the crap out of him.Characters in these modern animations do not have natural instincts though. They just magically accept the

June 23, 2010 11:41 PM

There used to be a school of cartooning I think of as "The Man Style".By "Man" I don't mean "manly", muscular, macho, athletic or anything like that. I mean the style and point of view reflects how men see the world. Men who have to work for a living, who had a tough childhood and had to sweat for everything they have, who have seen the ugliest parts of human nature, yet still can find amusement

June 23, 2010 05:48 AM

Illustrators and fine artists have been turning out tons of innovative architectural ideas for at least 120 years, but very little of it has been taken seriously by professional architects.  I believe that their neglect is about to turn around, and in thirty or forty years  a feeding frenzy will develop among architects for 20th Century art and illustration to crib from.  The reason I place this frenzy 40 years in the future is that some of the technology that'll enable it isn't in place yet.  Take the Mary Blair painting above.  Right now nobody could make an elevated train and tracks with a black as rich and saturated as the one above.  Nobody knows how to make white light like the white in the train's windows...I mean white like the pigment, and not just sunlight. Nobody could do what Blair did and make the sky near a building black, even at night. Nobody could color a real building with the vibrant colors available from a tube of gouache. But they almost certainly will. Have you seen the TV documentaries about the military research currently being done on bending light in order to render some colors nearly invisible? That's a neat trick, and it'll eventually pass into peace time civilian use. Depend on it, the same science that allows us to subdue color will enable us to enhance it. Expect to see Mary Blair's ideas made more real than any of us could have imagined. BTW: Thanks to Amid for the picture above.

Here's (above) another Blair picture.  I  I like the way Blair subdues the background buildings by making them shades of blue. It makes for nice contrast.  The day will come when distant buildings that appear blue from our vantage point will become colorful when approached,  and buildings that were previously colorful will become blue as they recede from us. I'm not talking about the misty blue brought about by aerial perspective, I mean saturated blue, like the pigment.  The people actually inside the building will see no color change at all. What I'm saying is that the not-too-distant future may bring us subjective color, which is experienced differently by different observers standing in different places. Interesting, huh?

June 23, 2010 02:59 AM

EphemeraStudies.org is a useful, intimate website for those of us with a love on for obscure printed matter of bygone days. Saul Zalesch, proprietor, is posting samples from his own collection – and in high resolution.

Ephemera is beginning to get more attention from academics these days, so I’m sure this site is going to become pretty popular soon. Saul says in his mission statement that he wants to help historians study this stuff, and as a historian of popular print, I am very grateful for his contribution.

Seen here: cover of a booklet issued in the 1920s, when the fad for painting old furniture took off with the increasing availability of premixed paints.

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Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 3 comments
Tags: ephemera, graphic design, print, Typography, vintage

June 23, 2010 02:40 AM

IT TOOK 7 YEARS TO DECIDE NOT TO CHANGE ANYTHINGI wouldn't have bet on it but if the marketing for this new Disney picture is any indication, it looks like it is. They seem to be flaunting how stale the movie is.WATCH MEEvery part of this trailer is something you've likely seen before - not just sort of seen- but exactly like what has been done a hundred times.The character designs and

June 22, 2010 09:22 PM

Zoran, a frequent commenter posted some great Calvin and Hobbes strips awhile ago and I've been meaning to link to them.I stopped reading comics strips in the 1970s when amateur artists began dominating the papers, but now and then I would notice a small handful of strips that stood out as the last lights flickering in the dim twilight of post-hippie decline of western culture.One was "Shoe" by

June 22, 2010 07:44 PM

Alejandro and the Idea Machine is a sculpted intallation piece by Souther Salazar. I love seeing his joyful cut-and-paste collage style realized as something three dimensional. The installation was a part of the Fumetto Comix Festival, and if this photo isn’t enough, check out the sweet time-lapse of its construction (detailed close-ups at the end of the video):

More process photos here.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 5 comments
Tags: Collage, sculpture, Souther Salazar

June 22, 2010 04:43 PM

Harvey Eisenberg's natural style was fairly traditional - basically very rounded characters like 40s animation: Tom and Jerry. When he started having to draw comics using Ed Benedict's more stylized angular characters, he went through a transitional period where he tried to adapt.His clean compact and controlled compositions were evident right away, but he had some trouble figuring out how to

June 22, 2010 04:22 PM

I wanted to share with you one of my students, Klaus-Martin Gareis's final assignments from my last semester online character design course on schoolism.com. He amongst others had made huge improvements in just nine weeks. The drawing on the left was the first assignment based on a character description I gave with no teaching yet. The pic on the right is the final assignment to draw this character again with their new found knowledge. My June 21st semester is all filled up and my next on which starts on September 6th has already started to fill up, so reserve your seat today.

June 21, 2010 09:04 PM

June 21, 2010 05:50 PM

Allison Reimold is a skilled painter — you can check out her blog or portfolio for proof of that — but I’m more partial to this sculpted and mounted fox head she created.

(via Super Punch)

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 4 comments
Tags:

June 21, 2010 02:49 PM

How did I miss this? New Construction is a blog of “cartooning practices and concerns” by Kevin Huizenga. Kevin H is a cartoonist’s cartoonist, and luckily I’m hungry for good writing on cartooning theory, craft, and process. Bookmarked and RSS’d.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: Cartooning, Kevin Huizenga, process

June 21, 2010 02:44 PM

For Sale on Etsy
Just finished this guy last night! If you want to see a full step-by-step breakdown of how I put it together, I have just such a guide for you. Since I'm cross-posting this across LJs, I'm leaving comments disabled on this entry but they're open in the link :)

June 20, 2010 08:19 PM

I'd intended to spend Friday and Saturday with the otters on the beaches near San Simeon, but the water was too cold for bathing so I and the family ended up spending a lot of time at the Hearst Castle instead.  Boy, am I glad I did! I've been to the castle before but I never took the all-important Tour #2, which concentrates on the architecture and the bedrooms.  What I saw may have changed my opinion of Hearst forever.

I can't make an adequate argument for the man in just one post. I'll just say that what I saw and heard convinced me that he was dedicated to persuading Americans that they lived in the most interesting and stimulating country in the world, that they had deep roots in European culture, and had an historic mission to advance civilization to a new level. His publications promoted these ideas and so did the castle, which he built as much for you and I as for himself.    You get a sense of this when you see the working spaces provided in guest's rooms.  I couldn't find pictures to match what I saw, but here's one (above) that hints at it.  The desks were museum pieces but were also frequently large and comfortable to work at.  Too much is made of the movie stars and celebrities he invited to the castle. An awful lot of the guests were writers, artists and photographers, and musicians, including creative people from his own publications.  Hearst wanted to be a catalyst for their work. He hoped he could inspire them with his vision of a Jazz Age dynamism informed by the highest achievements of Western civilization.

Here's (above) a frequently used room which served as Hearst's personal library, a conference room, and a study where he would work alone for long hours into the night.  Here he constantly admonished his editors and writers to try harder, to be more enthusiastic about the wonders of their time, to wake up the country to its enormous potential. He had a smaller, more personal desk in a small room at the back, behind the large painting. I've noticed that people who live in large houses often have personal spaces which are surprisingly modest in size and content.

Hearst's many guests stayed in opulent rooms. He saw to it that they had every convenience.

He himself stayed in quarters which were more modest; more intimate and cozy. This (left) is his bedroom but the photograph doesn't do it justice.

The deep impression the real room makes depends on the visitors awareness of the powerfully sheltering medieval ceiling (detail above), the beautifully proportioned space of the room taken as a whole, and the understated but intelligent design of the opposite walls. The room tells you a lot about the man, and it's all favorable. I'm a huge fan of Orson Welles, but in "Citizen Kane" my hunch is that he chose an interesting fiction about Hearst over infinitely more interesting facts. Hearst was a visionary hands-on publisher, whose magazines and newspapers were immensely successful. He was a money maker, not just a money spender.

June 20, 2010 03:19 PM

There is he, the man who inspired all my wackiest stuff!And what inspires him.Happy Father's Day, Dad!

June 20, 2010 02:22 PM

wanted to share a book that Steve Harpster who took my self publishing lesson on schoolism.com did. very exciting.

June 20, 2010 03:29 AM

I think that it's more daring to draw cartoons with just a few lines and details than it is to do fake "realistic" animation.You can't hide your ideas and skills under a lot of non-essential surface extras.In my opinion, Irv Spector here draws a million times better than all those nasty Filmation like humanoid mannequin cartoons.In just a few lines, he shows characters with attitudes, acting,

June 20, 2010 12:46 AM

Cartoon scenes are most often staged with all the characters looking at each other, each drawn at a 3/4 angle.Does it make sense? When you talk to your friend, do you each look askance at each other, or do you look directly at each other?Good cartoonists like Howie Post can make it look natural - but when Saturday Morning cartoons developed fear and conservatism to the point where everyone was

June 19, 2010 08:41 PM

Underdrawing and reverse mask design (because I have to trace it on the backside of the paper that'll be the mask, so that it'll face the correct way when it's flipped over)

Using this photo of Jasika Nicole Pruitt (who is a super awesome actress on Fringe and a cartoonist to boot) as reference for the figure.


Final pencils lightboxed onto fancy thick watercolor board.


Making sure the mask will be aligned correctly.


Watercolors.


Hair detail.




Piecing it all together.



Finished piece! Measures 8" x 10" x .5" on hangable wooden panel.


Detail.

June 19, 2010 02:46 AM

______________________________________________________http://disney.go.com/disneyhome/wdSignature.html

June 18, 2010 06:40 PM

I'm taking time off to go to the beach! I wonder if I can get my kid to come with me? BTW: That's not me in the picture above.

Bye, bye wage slaves! Have fun in your cubicles! See ya Monday!

June 18, 2010 04:29 AM

I wonder how it's possible to take something cute and do this to it:

June 17, 2010 10:49 PM

If you wanna make your characters seem alive and aware of each other's presence it's good to balance their poses against each other so that they are reacting to each other. Try to have their lines of action vary in strength and direction.USE NEGATIVE SPACE!If one character is doing the acting - have the other character reacting to it in a less dynamic but still active pose. It's a good trick to

June 17, 2010 05:45 PM

Nobody understood the future like Wally Wood.  He knew that our successors will have emotional conflicts just like we do, and that many a future spat will be settled with a laser blast. Here (above) two young space patrolers squabble under the ceiling of a futuristic bachelor pad owned by a nice old granny. The spaceman's wrinkly suit appears to be caught in his buttocks, but no one seems to notice. I love the way Wood handles his backgrounds. All his characters, even villains, creatures and old ladies, take an obvious delight in cavorting around the 50s furniture. Wood would have loved Ikea, which is as close to a real-life Wood theme park as we're likely to see.

Wood rightly assumed that future men will lust over beautiful babes the same way we do now.  He knew that women will spend a lot of time lounging around their pads in see-through clothing, and will therefore get lots of calls from guys on their video phones.

He foresaw that young men would live in spotlessly clean, high tech apartments in the tropical jungle. No bugs or mud, just friendly, beautiful neighbors.

Wood also knew that beautiful girls will have no need to take rocket ships to other worlds.  Every strange, loathsome beast in the galaxy will sooner or later come to them.

Last of all, Wood knew that tail fin cars would make a comeback, and that the future would be full of them. How did he know!? It's uncanny!

June 17, 2010 04:40 PM

Many Harvey kids have "stubbies" like Canadian beer bottles.Ketcham's kids tend to have bell-bottom legs.The basic forms that make up both Harvey and Ketcham kids are very similar. They have the same stock cartoon kid head construction.The 2 styles have some minor -but recognizable general differences - like the legs.Then each individual character has some specific accessory design element and

June 17, 2010 08:00 AM

Both Post and Fitzgerald are good at drawing clear silhouettes. The difference?Post's 2 characters are on one flat plane lined up right behind each other - which is not a criticism, just an observation.In Fitzgerald's sillo, each character is1) in a different pose,2) is positioned at a slightly different distance from our viewpoint and3) each inhabits all 3 dimensions.4) Parts of them come

June 17, 2010 02:59 AM

I am smitten with this highly inventive and entertaining animated film: Something Left, Something Taken.

It was created by husband-and-wife team Max Poter and Ru Kuwahata of Tiny Inventions. What’s special about the short is how it blends so many types of animation — hand-drawn, stop motion, After Effects, and even some good old fashioned puppetry — all with a charming hand-made crafty feel. Throw in a little forensic science and serial killer storyline, and you’ve got yourself CSI: Little Big Planet.

What’s more, the two have prepared an exhaustive behind-the-scenes making-of post on their website. They’ve documented just about every process, from the felty padded gloves photographed as the characters’ hands to the water made of Jell-O.

As someone who has done his share of very limited puppet-style animation in After Effects, this video on how the digital puppets were rigged and controlled using little proxies was a revelation:

via Cartoon Brew.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 13 comments
Tags: Animation, Crafts, Max Porter, process, puppets, Ru Kuwahata, Tiny Inventions

June 17, 2010 01:40 AM

Howie's characters are made up almost entirely from 40s "cartoon shapes" - the stock Elmer Fudd head construction, pear shaped bodies and tube arms. Their poses are utilitarian: they tell the story but do not distinguish any differences between the characters.Howie Relies On Basic Principles, Style, Natural Appeal and CartooninessMost of his poses are simple profiles, 3/4 views or straight on

June 16, 2010 07:51 PM

Comparing and contrasting 2 appealing cartoon approaches.These are 2 of my favorite cartoonists. They are both working in someone else's "house style" but are each bringing their own touch to the comics.Howie Post's style is made up almost entirely of 40s animated cartoon shapes and supplemented with his own abstract design quirks.Owen Fitzgerald's style looks on the surface also to be a 40s

June 16, 2010 04:29 PM

I wanted to invite you to a character design panel I am on tomorrow night June 17,2010 between 6:30 and 9:30 pm. that will take place at The Animation Guild in Burbank. if you are a non member it is $10 and member $5. It should be fun. I will also be selling super discounted books.
Myself, Bob Singer, Bill Schwab who did the "MUSINEX" commercial characters,Jamie Mitchell who did SPECIAL AGENT OSO, Bonita Varish who did the Klasky-Csupo characters like RUGRATS and Linda Miller will be speaking on Hanna-Barbera and possibly Don Bluth characters.

June 16, 2010 04:24 PM

Some people might wonder what the point is in copying the drawings of others. I'll tell you. It's so you can apply what you learned from the copies to your own drawings. It's not just so you can be good at copying.Geneva has been studying the work of Harvey Eisenberg and copying his original poses and scenes.She got very good at these straight copies so I suggested she go to the next step. ...to

June 15, 2010 04:08 PM

Here's a swell Howie Post comic from 1959. I'll write my observations later.I love the cartoony way he draws props and furniture. It's like that dresser is infused with life force, just waiting to be turned on so it can start bouncing to the music.I miss the promises in ads aimed at kids. We always used to say: "It must be true, or they couldn't advertise it!"FUNDAY FUNNIES WITH MATTIE MATTEL AND

June 14, 2010 10:03 PM

A Short Story by Eddie Fitzgerald
(Copyright 2010 by Eddie Fitzgerald)


It is I, Magog the hunter, daughter of Nartha the matriarch, and along with my fellow nogs I watched the metal thing emerge from the stars and, with fire roaring from its bottom, land on the surface of my cratered asteroid. None of us had ever seen anything like it, so we waited in practiced stillness to see what would happen. Who knows? Maybe there was a meal to be had here. Sure enough, after a bit, a hole appeared in its side and a creature emerged.

It walked on only two limbs, something none of us had ever seen before. How does it do that? Nogs have barely enough at twenty, twenty-two if you include the large mandibles which are for ripping and tearing, but are also useful as extra legs when running down prey.  No need for that now, though. With no prompting from us the thing was slowly advancing right into the middle of us, cautiously shining a wide beam of light into the shadows that defined our still and rock-like bodies.

I was in favor of waiting another moment or two but one of the hungriest young nogs impetuously reared up and loomed over the creature, its mandibles opening and closing; hot, steaming acid dripping from its grinding mouth parts. The startled creature made a move to run back to the metal thing but was cut off by several adolescents who spat a corrosive fixing fluid that anchored the creature to the spot.

The thing was doomed, but was apparently determined to sell its life dearly. It reached into a pouch on its side and frantically withdrew a thing which shot out beams of light which vaporized whatever they touched. A big mistake. At the sight of a struggling victim nogs go into a feeding frenzy of inconceivable ferocity. The creature shot its beams this way and that, pouring the destructive force of its energy into us; maiming, killing, destroying, and for a moment appeared to be getting the upper hand. It was time for me, the chief, to enter the fray.

With a leap I jumped onto the transparent globe on top of its body and sank my fangs into the smooth surface. The top of the disk crumbled and there was a whoosh of gas and inside I could see a soft hairy thing which I immediately bit. The flavor was indescribably delicious but the thing was still alive and was able to bring its shooter up to my abdominal segment and fire.

In the silence of space I saw my body divide into two wildly flailing parts. My entrails unwound into the ether and large quantities of blood escaped in shimmering globules. My time was up. I only had a moment of consciousness left, but that's not important. For nogs it's the species that matters, not the individual. With my last instant of wakefulness I watched as my belly disgorged hundreds of small nogs which carried the feeding frenzy into the gaping hole in the shattered dome.

Life goes on.

June 14, 2010 06:58 AM

Owen Fitzgerald can stage scenes from any angle and make it look easy.In this Dennis story about the family playing pool, every shot is a new angle.Drawing poses of someone playing pool would be tricky enough even left to right, but Owen does it from every possible perspective, seemingly without effort.And he still manages to make the posing look natural and balanced.I wonder if the reason Owen

June 13, 2010 03:56 PM

Yes.

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Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 13 comments
Tags: Scott Pilgrim, video games, yes

June 12, 2010 10:28 PM

This is for all the Theory Corner people who were mad at me for making pictures collide with the right sidebar. I can't promise to fix that right away...I just think it's funny...but readers deserve some satisfaction for all the suffering they've endured. For those readers I offer this picture (above) of me getting my just comeuppance.

As long as I'm in a confessional mood, I'll admit that I went out of my way to find pictures of busy subjects with the intention of buggering up the sidebar even more than I normally do.  I looked for pictures of messed-up hair, tangled wire, and spaghetti.

Why? Why do I have this irresistible urge to mess up my beautiful sidebar?  I don't know. It's one for the psychologists, I guess. I'll just offer my chin for one more chastisement then go back to my hole under the gnarled oak tree and nurse my wounds with the water beetles.

June 12, 2010 03:39 PM

Shaniqua's puppet show amusements are to no avail.CONTINUED FROM:http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2010/05/heartaches-pilot-5-ponzis-pity-pooch.htmlRoxy sighs: "It's no use, Shan. I just have to face a life without fuzz."Downtown, Mrs. VanPelt has fainted and is dragged off by her loving husband.Curly Fuzz Poodle has come to a momentous decision.He is about to share it with all his fans. He pulls

June 12, 2010 06:30 AM

Really enjoying Walt Taylor’s contributions to the Urban Sketchers blog.

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Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 9 comments
Tags: Illustration, sketches, urban sketchers, walt taylor

June 12, 2010 06:10 AM

It's funny to think that Terrytoons were considered the "cheap" cartoons back in the day.These are mostly fully animated and chock full of cartoon goodness.I could tell, even when I was a kid that they were produced kinda hastily but there was something unique and weird about them that you couldn't get in any other cartoons.There was even a period of "quality" Terrytoons in the mid forties with

June 12, 2010 12:46 AM

Simple, and brilliant, Yann Benedi’s Army, the first in a series of animated shorts about giants, is beautiful to look at, and showcases what great sound design can do to add emotion and atmosphere to a film. I look forward to future episodes.

Yann’s blog | Céline & Yann

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 5 comments
Tags: Animation, video, Yann Benedi

June 11, 2010 04:48 PM

I consider myself a kind man and a good neighbor. I look in the mirror and I see a sainted man full of the milk of human kindness, a real pillar of the community...or at least I did until the other day when a friend asked me to show him how Photoshop works.  I found myself saying, "Bugger off!  I had to learn it the hard way, and so should you!"

Actually I didn't say anything like that, but I rattled off some sugar-coated bromide that meant the same thing.  A minute later I felt terrible. How could I be so mean, I who had my tin cup out, begging friends for Photoshop help only a short time before? I made a note to call my friend back and offer to help, and also to try to understand my own selfishness.

After thinking about it, I concluded that maybe I'm not really such a jerk after all, that maybe something about Photoshop actually encourages behavior like that.  I had just learned it (sort of) and like everyone else I'd convinced myself that I'd just breezed through it, with no trouble at all. It was a comforting myth, and it made me feel good about myself. Now, with someone asking me to teach them, I was suddenly forced back into reality, and the painful memories of a time when it seemed I could do no right with the program.  Nothing makes you madder than being confronted with reality. What is it about programs that makes every user construct a personal mythology where every obstacle was painlessly pushed aside?  Something about computer culture makes every initiate a collaborator in the conspiracy to make computing seem faster to learn than it really is.

The computer era I live in reminds me of the way things were a hundred and fifty years ago when refined people wore starched shirts and whalebone corsets with rib-deforming waists and hoop skirts and elaborate hairstyles. Of course the trick to making all this bearable was to put all the fuss of morning dress-up out of your mind, and imagine that that you just put on whatever was handy.  Tom Wolfe nailed it when he said that human beings are status-seeking creatures and we'll do anything to convince ourselves and others that we acquired our god-like attributes with no effort at all. Soon I'm going to try to pick up the relevant parts of Illustrator and Flash. Then there's...Groooooooan!... ToonBoom. That's going to take time. I'd much rather spend the time improving my drawing and animation, but if I want to stay employed... Oh well, at least I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that after I go to all this stupid trouble I can create a memory for myself that I learned the programs effortlessly, in a few weeks.

June 10, 2010 11:26 PM

Wow wow wow. Gorgeous work from Jesse Lefkowitz.

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Posted by Luc Latulippe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 7 comments
Tags: Art, Design, Illustration

June 10, 2010 04:32 PM

SEE THE LATEST HENERY MAN CARTOON!Imagine what it would be like if they showed cartoons before the movie, instead of a half hour of commercials?It's hard for me to believe that they can charge you 10 bucks and then show you a half hour of commercials and say the movie has been "brought to you by The U.S. Marines" or Coke or whatever. How has it been brought to us by anyone if we have to pay for

June 10, 2010 04:23 PM

No one is better suited to explain the complex processes of nature to the vulgar masses than Dagwood - with some help from his intelligent assistants.Step one of the demonstration is to mix up a batch of active protoplasmic goo using nature's own chemical recipe.Stirring the goo brew is sure to result in excited Neutron Bullets.Dagwood can't make up his mind about who stirs the atomic juices

June 09, 2010 10:46 PM

The CalArts Story from Christine Ziemba (CalArts) on Vimeo.

From 24700, the official blog for CalArts, this interesting historical gem from 1964 has been found in their video vaults. “The CalArts Story” was a short film (about 15 minutes) that was originally presented at the gala premiere of Mary Poppins. It’s long and drawn out—much like the live action short films produced by Disney during that time, but it’s a fascinating look at what Walt Disney had in mind for the future of the school.

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Posted by Ward Jenkins on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: CalArts, history, short film, Walt Disney

June 09, 2010 07:46 PM

 How 'bout some Joan Crawford slaps (above)? There's some real dooseys here.  Slaps are a useful dramatic device. The writing in a scene builds up to its slap, as does the performance. The worse thing a writer can do to an actor is to leave them rudderless in a scene that meanders all over the place. Slaps give a scene a direction, something to build to.



My favorite screen slap of all time is the one in "Mildred Pierce" where Crawford's daughter slaps Joan on the stairs. Crawford is completely disoriented and nearly falls off screen. No wonder...the slap was real. Crawford insisted on it. I wonder how many takes it took to shoot it?




Was Crawford tough in real life? I'm not sure. The stories are contradictory. In the interview above Arlene Dahl implies that Crawford deliberately threw her drink at her while at a dinner party. In the same interview Gloria DeHaven says Crawford unselfishly taught her a really useful vocal technique, and  tells us what the technique was.



My guess is that the real-life Crawford was usually pretty nice, but we can hope that there were exceptions. I like to think of her as the hostess in this scene (above), where she fires her maid for dropping a cup. Crawford's real life daughter Christine, author of "Mommy Dearest," claims she was just like the roles she played in "Queen Bee" and "Harriet Craig."

BTW, I think the person who uploaded this video meant to title it: "Joan Crawford Is Pissed in the Movie Entitled 'Harriet Craig.'" The present title implies that Crawford did something unspeakable to someone named Harriet Craig.



What a whiner Crawford's real life daughter was! Here (above) Christine gets the punishment she deserves by being a guest on a nightmarish Italian TV show that never lets her speak. Watch it to the end because the actor who dubbed Cliff Robertson's voice does an even more over the top vocal than Robinson.

June 09, 2010 08:07 AM

One of my favorite movies.

June 08, 2010 11:48 PM

I have admired the work of Jochen Gerner for a while now. His style is pure cartooning — taking the complex, and abstracting it into something simple. This minimalist, geometric approach to drawing is not limited to just the design of characters and objects, but also to the layout of the illustrations themselves. The illustrations become diagrams, allowing the viewer to take in a lot of information at a glance.

Looking through his sketchbooks reveals the mind of an artist constantly honing his illustrative shorthand, and his own cartooning vocabulary.

His experiments in abstraction and subtraction is no more evident than in a series of modified IKEA catalogue pages:

When I visited the Owlkids booth at TCAF this year, I was pleased to see that their publishing imprint had released a fun book of drawing activities for kids called ARTastic!: 200+ Art Smart Activities. It’s a colouring book with puzzles, challenges, and creativity-sparking activities all drawn in Gerner’s simple, chunky, kid-friendly lines.

It’s quite similar to Japanese artist Taro Gomi’s equally awesome and art-smart Scribbles, Doodles, and Squiggles drawing books for kids — books that encourage creativity and thinking by requiring one to colour outside the lines.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 6 comments
Tags: Cartooning, Creative Thinking, Drawing, Illustration, jochen gerner, Taro Gomi

June 08, 2010 08:35 PM

June 08, 2010 04:22 PM

I've been laughing at this guy's paintings and sculptures for years (that's Seinfeld above), but I never knew his name til now. Maybe you didn't either. It's David O'Keefe, possibly the best caricature sculptor in the world right now.

Every caricaturist does Clint Eastwood, but how many do him this well (above)?

Above, an impressive Brando.

An awesome Nicole Kidman (above). Where'd she get a mouth like that?

Not a bad Sheryl Crow (Crowe?)!

O'Keefe paints too. You can buy prints on his site.  This one's (above) called "The Clinton Years."

Recognize Led Zeppelin? Check out David's site: http://www.davidokeefe.com/

June 07, 2010 05:18 PM

If there’s one thing I love about the iPhone, it’s a resurgence in casual, pixely, retro gaming. I am really looking forward to The Incident, an upcoming game by Matt Comi and Neven Mrgan of Big Bucket Software. It’s like some hyper hybrid of Tetris, Katamari Damacy, and Super Mario Bros.

Here’s a video of the actual gameplay:

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 5 comments
Tags: Matt Comi, Neven Mrgan, Pixel Art, video games

June 07, 2010 03:16 PM

I'm gonna prove to you that Jesus loves war and a good cartoon butt-stabbing as much as the rest of us.This is George Baker's early style. He was a real cartoonist. Pure and full of honest humanity.I always liked his work. Gritty, funny, manly, ribald and to the point.It got a lot more stylish as time went on and I find it really interesting to see how it started.This early stuff is more

June 07, 2010 02:22 PM

MARS! from Joe Bichard on Vimeo.

Great short film by Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham. Umm…drill, baby, drill?

(via Cartoon Brew)

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Posted by Ward Jenkins on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 8 comments
Tags:

June 07, 2010 01:44 AM

If anyone can do it, it's Dagwood.Culled from the archives of Professor Mike Fontanelli, curator of the Alexandrian Library of Cartoon art.I wish Dagwood had been teaching when I was at school. Maybe I would have paid attention.More exciting adventures in education to come...

June 06, 2010 11:37 PM

No harm has befallen this imaginary creature.http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/2010/05/ibexes-for-sale.html

June 06, 2010 05:08 PM

Ever since the late fifties a large number of intellectuals in this country (above) have been bohemians. Even some traditional intellectuals like Bill Buckley had a bit of a bohemian side to them, and enjoyed playing to bohemian audiences.  That's understandable. The 50s intellectuals seemed to be searching for something elusive,  and you always have a grudging respect for seekers, no matter how addled they may be in other respects.  I like the late 50s intellectuals too...well, sort of...but I also like the poor wretches that preceded them in the forties and early 50s. Before the Beats most intellectuals were attached to universities. There's was a frustrating era because everybody knew the old world had ended with WWII, but nobody had a handle on the new one.  An awful lot of those intellectuals decided to be placeholders. They were determined to shepherd the old ideas and values into the mysterious new era, integrating them with whatever scary thing would come next. Personally, I respect that that.  Keeping old wisdom alive in a world that had recently been gutted by fanaticism was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The problem was that the old wisdom, at least when it was stated in the old way, was curiously out of sync with the new era. Immensely destructive changes were ahead, and these heroic placeholders were doomed to pass into obscurity.  I think they knew it, they just didn't know what to do about it. Anyway,  they were an admirable bunch of people who were riddled with funny quirks and affectations as all good people are. Pipes (okay, cigarettes), woolen tweeds,  bow ties, Terry Thomas moustaches...they had it all, as you can see in the films below. Here (above) an unidentified announcer of that era sits with critic Lionel Trilling, and "Lolita" author, Vladimir  Nabokov. The set is a room filled with statues, wainscoting, pillars, old European furniture and a working oil lamp which functions as a sort of candelabra.  After talking for a bit around the lamp, all move over to the sofa, as if to enjoy cigars and brandy. It's a wonderful world where intellect and culture still have a place. It just seems funny to see all those cultural artifacts crammed into such a tiny space. I like it, though. If this show were still on I'd watch every episode.

Nabokov is fascinating, but he doesn't really say anything. Trilling attempts to say it for him and is good-naturedly rebuffed. Boy, you can never get creative people to tell you how they do what they do.

Trilling has real charisma. He has that great tortured look that intellectuals are supposed to have, as if every word was painful to enunciate.  The moderator, Pierre Berton,  does a great job of setting a musical tone that sets up pleasing counterpoints from his guests. It's a great little ensemble. Even if nothing memorable is said, it's wonderful theater.

Aaaargh! I'm too tired to write anymore.

June 06, 2010 07:51 AM

Jon McNaught’s new graphic novella from Nobrow Press, Birchfield Close, is a most perfect little treasure of a comic.

Printed with a restrained three colours, the short book is a gentle, unassuming reflection on time, place, and sound. It’s not so much a story as it is a snapshot of suburban life. The sights and sounds of a sleepy, mundane evening become the beats and rhythms in the poetry of a neighbourhood.

It’s a lovely, precious little piece of nostalgia. It makes me hungry for more comics-as-poetry. I was unfamiliar with McNaught’s work, but am looking forward to discovering more of his work. His website offers up a decent amount of his other comics work, all of it as equally reflective. He has an uncanny ability to perfectly capture moments in time. His comics feel like real memories.

I’ve just reread his minicomic Broadcast, available to read on his website, three times in succession, marvelling at how he plays with colour, sound effects, and pacing.

Here are some panels from another story of his, Pebble Island.

His blog features more of his work, including some lovely-looking prints. I am officially a fan.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 14 comments
Tags: Comics, Jon McNaught, Nobrow Press

June 05, 2010 06:47 PM

This is so great. Project Thirty-Three is a blog/gallery from Seattle’s Jive Time Records showcasing vintage record jackets boasting simple, modernist designs. There’s a resurgence of this clean, abstract aesthetic these days, mostly in the form of pastiche or faux vintage paperback parodies and movie posters. But there’s nothing quite like the real deal, especially because it so reminds us that this look was de rigueur for jazz and classical music. These designs were once on actual store shelves and not just student designer’s blogs.

On the opposite side of the visual spectrum, Jive Time also curates Groove is in the Art, a similar blog devoted to anything-but-minimal pop art and psychedelic album jackets like these:

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 5 comments
Tags: album art, Design, Music

June 04, 2010 05:26 PM

This house is a basically simple design. But it's the dynamic angles they are drawn in that impress.There is a misleading looseness to these drawings that might make you think they are hastily thought out.But underneath the sketchy lines are some really difficult angles, killer posing and clever staging. The line style is just Fitzgerald's way of imposing some of Ketcham's style on top of his own

June 04, 2010 05:25 PM

Graham Annable (born June 1, 1970, in Canada) is a cartoonist and animator living in Portland, Oregon. He is the creator of Grickle, published by Dark Horse, and one of the founders of the Hickee humor anthology (published by Alternative Comics). Annable has created works for the television, film, video game, and comic book industries. His
self-produced short animated films are popular among YouTube watchers.

Graham recently released a best-of compilation of his comics through Dark Horse, The Book of Grickle.

Drawn!: You have a new book out, The Book of Grickle, which comprises some of your short comic pieces. Is this a continuation of your previous books, Grickle, and Further Grickle, or is there some overlap?

Graham Annable: I’d say overall it’s a collection of my favourite pieces spanning from 2001-2007. It contains a selection of stories from the previous out of print Grickle and Further Grickle books and sprinkled amongst those tales are mini comics and hard to find stories I’ve done over the past few years. It feels great to have them all together in such a nice little hardcover package.

D: How would you define Grickle? If not the word itself, then the body of work. Is it an umbrella term for all your personal work, or is there something specific and Grickley about the stories and art you release under hat name?

GA. I would say it’s an umbrella term for the style and types of stories I seem to create. The name comes from the many nicknames my Dad used for both my sister and I growing up. When I first compiled the stories into a home-made booklet years ago “Grickle” just felt like the right unifying name for it all. And it has ever since.

D: Your stories — both in the comics, and your animated shorts on YouTube — often tend towards the dark and the bizarre. What is it that draws you to these kinds of stories and scenarios? Who are some of your influences?

GA: I don’t know for sure. It’s the type of stories I’ve always naturally gravitated to. I’m a big Stanley Kubrick fan, along with Polanski and Lynch too. They all create films and stories that have an incredible amount of emotional punch and starkness for me. I love experiencing that in stories whether it’s in film or books or whatever medium. Some cartoonists I admire are Sempe, Trondheim, and Harvey Kurtzman. They all tell so much with so little. I really admire that in art and it’s what I think I’m always striving for in my own work.

D: The cartooning influences certainly all are evident when looking at your work. The characters of Grickle — including your sort-of everyman character — all have a simple,stick figure quality to them. Obviously this creates a freedom for you as a storyteller — not only can the characters be whomever you want them to be, but I imagine they can be posed fairly quickly (and to great effect). How did you come to this style? Was it intentional, or did it evolve out of animation and storyboarding deadlines?

GA: The style has evolved out of my desire to find the quickest, most efficient method of finalizing an idea onto paper. Not so much because of deadlines (although it helps!) but out of a need to stay inspired with an idea and then get onto the next piece of business while still riding that wave of motivation. I like to get to the good stuff and then move on. :) I’m sure working in animation over the years has a lot to do with it as well.

D: Tell me a little bit about your writing process — for both the comics and animated pieces. The dialogue in your comics is very natural, and almost seems improvised. How much planning is involved in your work, and how much of the writing is done during the creation? Likewise, animation is usually so labourious as to prevent much improvisation, but your limited motion and simple character design suggest that it’s more of a possibility in your work than in most animation.

GA: The majority of my stories start from a single event or doodle. I get struck with a situation that I find compelling and I then begin to build context around it from there. Usually I’ll move onto doodling out the story idea in really small thumbnails and visuals so rough that I’m the only one who could decipher them (most of the time). I really try hard to let the characters talk in a natural manner and not get too hasty to consolidate all the essential story bits right away. The thing that I love most about comics and animation is the characters and so I want them to have a chance to breathe on the page or in film as best as I can without losing the story. That’s always the balance I strive for in my work.

D: Can you walk us through your process for creating your animation? What software do you use, and how do you put it all together?

GA: Sure! I draw everything using a Cintiq monitor. All the artwork is done in Photoshop using some custom brushes I have. I then organize my animation into layers and bring it all into AfterEffects. In AfterEffects I get all the timing and sound work done and then export out a finished movie file. It’s a pretty simplistic process.

D: Which Grickle short is your favourite?

GA: I really can’t say. They’ve all been enjoyable ventures for me and I like each of them for different reasons I think. I suppose the Hidden People holds a special place in my heart but I feel unfair even saying that.

D: Can we expect a collection of the animated shorts any time in the future?

GA: It’s something I’ve been asked about a lot over the years. I think at some point I will stop and take a breather and just focus on getting them all collected. But for now it’s too much fun just continuing to create them.

D: Tell us a bit about Puzzle Agent, the game based on your artwork for Telltale Games. How did it come about? You were the creative director at Telltale, which itself was founded by former colleagues if yours from LucasArts. How does it feel to have your work come full circle like this, to where a game’s look is now influenced by your personal creative work?

GA: It’s been incredibly rewarding to have this project happen. The folks at Telltale really grasp my style and sensibilties and so I have complete confidence in them making this a truly “Grickle” kind of a game. I’ve always maintained a close relationship with everyone there even after I’d departed as creative director some years ago. I’ve been creating a webcomic Dank/Dunk continously on the website since the company began. The project happend as a result of some good timing for both parties. I pitched an idea to them about a Grickle puzzle mystery game and it just happened to coincide with their plans to begin a pilot program at the company. The Grickle game was a perfect fit to launch this new model of game creation for the company.

D: I’ve enjoyed your Stuff I Remember drawings on Flickr. Partly because they are departure in both style and subject matter from your Grickle pieces, but also because I’m fascinated by the sorts of things that people hold on to from childhood. Do you have any aspirations to do more autobiographical stuff, or explore more of these little vignettes/moments?

GA: I’m very glad you enjoyed them. I definitely intend to continue to do them as ideas and memories come to me. I’ve really enjoyed trying to encapsulate these past moments into vignettes I can share with others.

D: What’s next on your plate?

GA: I’ve got a couple of comics related projects I’m looking forward to diving in to once I’ve completed work on the “Puzzle Agent” game. The video game has kept me so busy as of late that I’ve had to put a few things on the back burner. There are also numerous animated short ideas I can’t wait to put up on the Grickle channel. Just need to find the time again. Soon! :)

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: Animation, Comics, Graham Annable, Interviews

June 03, 2010 07:18 PM

My theory is that during the first year of an animation program, the students should learn basic animation by using classic rubber-hose characters and moving them the way animators moved things in the 1930s. Then they should work their way into slightly more organic characters the next year or 2.WHY LEARNING TO ANIMATE WITH RUBBER HOSE STYLE SPEEDS YOUR PROGRESSIt's a very appealing style on its

June 03, 2010 03:53 PM

Salesman Pete Trailer from Salesman Pete on Vimeo.

I am beginning to think that a major export of France is insanely talented animation students. In support of this theory is a student film due to be completed next month: Salesman Pete and The Amazing Stone.

(link via Josh Burton)

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Posted by Jared Chapman on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 11 comments
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June 03, 2010 02:08 PM

Shan comes over with her own hand-made puppet collection. She puts on a funny show to try to cheer Roxy up and make her forget about her great loss. Shan waves Fuzzy Bunny's whiskers on Roxy's nose. Roxy resists happiness.The trauma begins. Instantly the cute puppets attack each other's most personal weaknesses."Oh yeah? Well I hate you, Gooney-Thing! You're nasty and ugly!" yells Fuzzy Bunny. "

June 03, 2010 05:45 AM

I think Ketcham and his crew have a perfect balance of skill, style, cartooniness and observation.I have a Dennis comic that has some wonderful drawings of cows, cars, housesand of course, milfs.I want to do a post on one of these things they excel at.You decide which I should do first.This is my attempt at a bit of market research.YOU CAN LEARN A LOT FROM HANK KETCHAMOWEN FITZGERALD MENACES

June 02, 2010 10:17 PM

Jacques Khouri, whose previous film Vice Versa we linked to last year, has completed a small handful of new animated shorts. The first, Time & Again, explores sequential comic panels within an animated context, and once again draws comparisons to Chris Ware.

The second, Words, illustrates visual plays on language:

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: Animation, Jacques Khouri, video

June 02, 2010 07:50 PM

Here's my latest Photoshop exercise. I do collages because they require the use of different selection tools, which I'm still struggling with.  When I'm okay with those I'll pay more attention to edges, blends, noise, etc.

June 02, 2010 05:10 PM

I'm not a expert on Hank Ketcham's ghost artists, but he seems to have a great staff of them. Here's one that's amazing.This might be another. (if you recognize the artist(s) let us know!)The Dennis the Menace comics have some of what I think are the most balanced, stylish and skilled cartoon art ever. Ketcham must have also schooled his assistants in the finer points of Milf art.more later

June 02, 2010 04:45 PM

I am in a group gallery show coming up June 12th Meltdown comics. That is a tiny snippet from my piece. Stop on by, check it out and say ello, ello!

June 02, 2010 04:08 AM

It's great to learn fundamental cartoon basics, like construction, line of action, silhouettes etc. But those are just your starting points. You don't want to be trapped in formula. Principles alone don't make a point of view or entertainment.Not everything is made of the same few shapes. Animation, being probably the most inbred artform ever (maybe excepting rap) has a bad tendency of producing

June 01, 2010 11:11 PM

If you are trying to teach yourself classical cartoon construction, this is a gift from on high. From high up the stairs where Mike Fontanelli lives. It's a beautifully sculpted 3 fully dimensional Porky Figure.Good sculptures of cartoon characters tell you what cartoon shapes really look like in perspective. Note in the 3/4 shot that his cranium is not stacked directly on top of his lower face

June 01, 2010 11:00 PM

One of my favourite scores from TCAF this year was a copy of Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson’s Tigerbuttah book. Printed like a vintage Golden Book, the story follows the perfect retro-styled adventures of young Tigerbuttah rediscovering his imagination. The printing for the book was done by the Golden Books people themselves, so it looks and feels just like the real deal. In fact, its silver foil spine (the gold spine is copyrighted) is the only giveaway that this book is slightly different, and kind of special.

Tigerbuttah is available through the fine folks at Topatoco.

Don’t forget to visit Tiny Kitten Teeth for more Tigerbuttah adventures and comics.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 10 comments
Tags: Becky Dreistadt, Books, Frank Gibson, Illustration

June 01, 2010 10:27 PM

Austin Kleon shares photos of his sketchbook. I applaud Austin’s efforts to ensure that his sketchbooks are not precious things, but rather places for messy, reckless doodling and thinking.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 24 comments
Tags: Austin Kleon, Creative Thinking, Drawing, sketchbooks

June 01, 2010 09:56 PM

Norm McGary is one of my favorite Golden Book painters.He has a slick style and puts just enough detail into the backgrounds and characters to give you a different experience than what you get from watching the cartoons.The cartoons have the advantage of sound and motion but are limited in how the characters can be rendered, so good Golden Books like McGary's give you extra treats in the

June 01, 2010 04:16 PM

That's a musical number above, from the film "Bright Star" which was well reviewed when it came out in 2009, but which was afterward completely forgotten. I'll have more to say about the music in a minute.

The film's about my favorite poet of the Romantic Era, John Keats, and his never consummated love for Fanny Brawne. Reviewers liked the film, though some thought it was weak on story and was only saved by the performances. Some lamented that it never touched very seriously on Keats' poetry. They're right on both counts...well, half right...but if you liked films like "Shakespeare in Love," then you have to see it nevertheless.

I like a good love story, not only because I believe in the philosophy that underpins romantic love (discussed in previous posts), but because when these stories are done right they stimulate your thinking about everything else. To be in love is to live in a state of hyper awareness, when even the cracks in the sidewalk seem to have deep meaning. It's nice to be reminded of a time when we were fully alive, no matter how torturous it might have been in some respects.



To get back to the film's music: The top video is from the film and is a vocal adaption of Mozart's Serenade in B Flat, K361.  For comparison, here's (immediately above) an original, instrumental version of the same music. The vocal version stands up pretty well, I think.

In the film Fanny tells Keats that she doesn't like poetry because she can never understand what poems mean. Keats gives a great answer, one which applies to visual art (examples by Van Gogh above) as well as poetry:  "The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake...to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not 'work the lake out.' It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery." Woooow! Well said! I think of what Keats said when I look at drawings by Van Gogh. No doubt they're about the beauty of the natural world, but they're also about the power of lines and the awesome human mind that can manipulate them so expressively. To borrow from Keats: you luxuriate in the lines...in the sensation of the flow of them, and of the dynamic spaces between them.

June 01, 2010 02:25 AM

Boy, Photoshop really is a fun program. There's a lot you can do with it, even at the primitive level that I'm working at.  I keep making mistakes though, like the one above, which seems to read "Theory Corned."

I wanted a logo I could use for a short science fiction story I was thinking of writing for the blog. I only have a title so far: "Feel My Fangs on Your Space Helmet." I'm torn between using letters that are pure color, with no outline (above)...

...and outlined lettering (above), which is easier to read, but more conventional. Without borders the words appear to be floating in the air, as if they were shrieks of horror uttered by some alien creature that just found itself bitten in half.  With borders the letters appear to be simple conventions of the publishing industry. BTW: It's Memorial Day and I'll take this opportunity to say thanks to American soldiers past and present who made it possible for people like me to express ourselves freely in blogs like this one. Your sacrifices are much appreciated!

June 01, 2010 02:10 AM

Live, in LA Areaif enough folks are interested12 lessons$12006 weeks/2 lessons per weekmust have some basic skills firstIf you're interested post drawing lessons from 1-7 on a blog and send me a link to checkIf you have the stuff it takes you will be acceptedhttp://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/preston-blair-lessons-fundamentals-of.htmlmore details to come

June 01, 2010 12:55 AM

Do check out this new blog by the very prolific artist, Kagan Mcleod, focusing on his favourite musicians (above = Freestyle Fellowship). Says Kagan,

This is just a random collection of fan art, mostly done in the hour before I go to bed, for fun. My tastes are pretty wide so I hope there will be something for everyone — I’d say my favourites are almost everything ’50s, ’60s and early-’70s, along with ’80s and ’90s rap and R & B, and a scant helping of more recent stuff.
Please enjoy!

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Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: Illustration, Kagan McLeod, Music, music illustration

May 31, 2010 05:43 PM

Jim Smith honors our fighting babies who suffer the unspeakable horrors of battle and wet diapers in order to preserve all we hold sacred.To all the babies who fight and cried for us, thank you!

May 31, 2010 04:18 PM

Sometimes it's fun to base a cartoon character off a person you know. This is Jose Pou - a fellow cartoonist and animator who worked with me on APC and other cartoons.Cartooning real people in action is a challenge because they are much more specific in design and personality than most cartoon characters.Jose Pou is a beautiful specimen of specificity. He not only has a very unique design, but he

May 29, 2010 11:01 PM

My pal, Pou.

May 29, 2010 06:32 PM

May 29, 2010 03:46 PM

Boy, I love to see movies on a big screen in a packed theater!

It must have been great to see them in Technicolor, and in ornate vaudeville-style theaters that were like palaces inside. That's a Lego theater above. Every once in a while Lego knocks themselves out to make a toy that nobody can afford, but is very near a work of art.

How different the Lego building is from minimalist modern theaters (above), which often look like banks or Walmart stores.  Some are amazingly featureless and stealthy. You could be standing next to them and  and never know it. In the case of the theater above, the designer thoughtfully wrote "Box Office" on the ticket vender's window just to let us know what it was.

















I wish I could figure out why modern movie houses disposed of the marquee. It was sheltering and fun to look at, and it announced the theater's presence to the world. You could see it from the road and no doubt it seduced lots of drivers and walkers-by into seeing the films. Notice too, the film posters are out on the street where people can see them, and not concealed inside or in a side alley, like the ones in my neighborhood.

When I told this to my kid he rolled his eyes up and said that marquees were unnecessary since people get all the info they need online.  He said nobody goes to a theater on an impulse anymore. Maybe, I thought, but it couldn't hurt to scoop up the few that do.

Actually, some modern theaters do have marquees...sort of. Here's (above) an ugly one on a theater that looks like it was built in the 80s. It's mind-numbing and bland, and looks like a bank, but at least it puts its posters out front where people can see them.

Here's one current marquee style.  This example looks like it's outside, but a lot of marquees of this type are inside, over interior ticket windows. You have to go inside to see it.

Like I said, a lot of modern theater owners have dispensed with marquees entirely.  In this theater (above) the titles of the films that are playing are written on bumper stickers  high on the wall behind the ticket sellers.  If you crouch down low enough,  and use your hand to screen out the reflections on the tinted glass, you might discover what's playing and when.

Don't expect to see mirrors in the restroom. If you're lucky the management might provide slightly reflective sheets of steel.  If not, then the walls will be bare.

No more movie palaces. Just bare bones walls and seats.

I wish theaters would bring back usherettes.  They look good and besides, you can use usherettes to sell the outrageously priced candy to people in their seats.

May 28, 2010 09:27 PM

I didn't realize there was smog in London, but if you go there, make sure you bring your Viewmaster. It works just like a gas mask.

May 28, 2010 03:54 PM

ComicCrazys was forced to take down the Charles Schulz cartoons I linked to the other day, but here’s another treat: some Looney Tunes background paintings.

It’s a small selection, but includes some great examples, including a few from Maurice Noble, who I think was the finest of all of the Warner Brothers background artists, and defined the look of Chuck Jones’s cartoons almost as much as Chuck Jones himself.

Another great source for Looney Tunes background paintings is the aptly-named Animation Backgrounds blog. Unfortunately none of the posts there are tagged in any useful way, but do a Google search for Warner specific to that blog, and you should be able to find everything.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 8 comments
Tags: Animation, looney tunes

May 27, 2010 10:21 PM

I’m a big proponent of most nerdy things, but I have to admit that the idea of LARPing is still just so silly to me. I’ve seen the documentaries, and I can really get behind the community aspect of live action role playing, but it doesn’t stop me from giggling at grown adults running around a park, in costume, hitting each other with foam bats.

That said, I’d like cartoonist Nick Edwards to create a comic describing the ins and outs of just about anything I find objectionable. His cartoon introduction to LARPing brings humour and energy into a subject I have otherwise dismissed outright.

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Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 4 comments
Tags: Comics, LARP, nick edwards

May 27, 2010 09:41 PM

Japanese magazines have some really good layout in them.These clusters of Dream Pets could easily have been cluttered disorganized messes, but instead they ad up to a pleasing and easy to understand design. The whole composition and arrangement invites your eyes to navigate easily accross the page.The layout artist arranged all the characters very carefully to make them:1) Read Clearly (

May 27, 2010 07:35 PM

For anyone interested in children’s book illustration, this month is a milestone because Picturing Canada: A History of Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing has finally been released by the University of Toronto Press.

It’s the fruit of 11 years of research by Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman, plus their hordes of graduate students from the University of British Columbia. While there are about 60 reproductions of illustrations in this book, it is a scholarly study rather than a coffee-table book – but it is very readable and not boring in the least if you’re at all interested in the topic. They use extensive quotes from interviews with well over 100 people – illustrators, authors, publishers, librarians, critics – about all aspects of the production, selling, politics and reception of kids’ books. It is truly mandatory reading for anyone whose work is intended for Canadian children, whether you work in books, animation, toys, or theatre.

In the course of this research, the team at UBC in Vancouver have also put together excellent online resources like this bibliography, and guide; and there is also an exhibition of children’s book illustration.

The official launch is today, Thursday May 27, at 5 p.m. at Ben McNally Books in Toronto.

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Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: canada, children's books, Illustration, publishing

May 27, 2010 05:15 PM

They should have made some cartoons in this style.and more Disney Friendssuch a happy style!

May 27, 2010 06:30 AM

This is an interesting show. You can see from the layouts that real professional cartoonists are drawing it.The design and balance is good.It's a great concept- a sitcom family in space, where you make fun of all the futuristic gadgets.The only problem is, the show never took advantage of its core elements. It's way too conservative.The poses are bland, the gags are slightly silly but not

May 26, 2010 07:50 PM

Sorry to inflict these amateurish pictures on you. I'm still practicing Photoshop and, as you can see,  the pictures don't always turn out so good.

May 26, 2010 12:21 PM

Poor old abandoned Curly Fuzz Poodle wanders the cold cruel city streets alone.He puffs on a discarded doggy bone; his sole comfort in a world fated against used toys.He gives in to his destiny.A rich corporate magnate and his wife happen to be taking a stroll downtown to see how the lower-half lives. Mr. Ponzi, a dog-lover, stops and sees the ragged dog. "Hey Sweetums. Look! A poor homeless mutt

May 26, 2010 06:07 AM

The mighty Buck creates a fantastic world made entirely of Sherwin Williams’s paint chips. Click on image to see the animated ad, or click here. They mention that this is the first in a series for the paint company. Looking forward to seeing the rest.

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Posted by Ward Jenkins on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 6 comments
Tags: Animation, Buck, commercials

May 25, 2010 05:28 PM

What with all the hubbub over Flash these days, it’s nice to see an artist utilize the program as a means throughout the process of animating, not using it as a crutch. Animator and filmmaker Nick Cross gives us a detailed account of his process when he animates in Flash, including video. It’s a fascinating look into how Nick works as well as how he’s able to use Flash without making it look like it was done in Flash. Just good ol’ animation skills that can’t possibly be replicated by a computer program.

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Posted by Ward Jenkins on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: Animation, flash, Nick Cross, penciltest

May 25, 2010 05:06 PM

If you have been reading my blog for awhile, you know that Howie Post is one of my favorite cartoonists. Well, I just heard that he recently passed away. I hope that he at least knew that he had recently been rediscovered on all the blogs.He's known mostly for his Harvey comics, especially Spooky and Little Audrey. I used to buy Harvey comics and go right to his stories without knowing his name.

May 25, 2010 03:48 PM

One of the best zines I picked up at the Toronto Comics Festival earlier this month was a little greyscale, brush & ink comic called Little Wolves by James Hindle. You can read the whole thing online here.

Now I’m going to go read the rest of his comics (also online)…

James Hindle, previously on Drawn.

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Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 10 comments
Tags: Comics, James Hindle, stories, Webcomics

May 24, 2010 06:32 PM

Boy, I love old-time theatrical costume sketches (above), the best of them I mean.  I had the impression that nothing good was being done in that medium any more, but I'm glad I took the trouble to check, because there's some interesting stuff out there that deserves to be seen.

Lots of sketch styles are acceptable now.  Amazingly, one of them (above) is caricature.

Another is collage. This artist (above) is pretty good at it.  I like how the dog is walking backwards.

Very nice (above), and it's practical, too. I have no trouble envisioning the real-life costume.

This guy (above) looks like a character out of an Otto Dix painting.

This picture (above) is pretty abstract but it conveys the important information.  I assume the play is a comedy where the superhero has to look broad and lumpy in his suit. The sagging diaphragm is a nice touch.

This picture (above) is skimpy on the details but the overall concept is solid. Sometimes the designer is limited to suggestion, and the costume maker figures out the details.

Wow! What a prolific artist (above)! Better click to enlarge!

Interesting (above)! A Steinberg-type style combined with 3D collage! It's a very girly treatment but, as with everything here, you can use your imagination to see something more masculine.

Sometimes swatches of fabric are added to the sketch. Designers keep enormous scrapbooks full of samples of the stuff that are pinned or stapled onto the page.

According to an article on the net, the designer usually starts with cut-outs of pre-existing pictures from magazines (above) just to see if her and the director are in sync.

Here's (above) Ann Roth showing off her designs for old Hollywood movies, and here's a link to an interesting interview that she gave. Part 2, the best part, is only a couple of minutes long, and it contains advice that all artists in all trades can use. http://makingof.com/insiders/media/ann/roth/ann-roth-on-costume-design-pt-2/61/172

May 24, 2010 04:53 PM

Felt Mistress AKA Louise Evans (previously featured on Drawn!) is a UK-based stitcher, prolific tea drinker and creator of some of the best darn dolls these adoring eyes have ever gazed upon. Utilizing skills learned as a couture dress maker and milliner, Lousie works with her partner, illustrator Jonathan Edwards, on a wild and wooly array of wonderful one-off creatures. Other notable collaborations include her work with three very talented Jon’s; Jon Burgerman, Jon Knox and John Allison.

Current projects include shows such as Brain Drain with Jon Burgerman, Heliumcowboy (link might not be safe for work), Plush You! LA, a few upcoming custom shows and some super duper top secret solo projects to which she claims she’s sworn to secrecy (for the time being). To keep up with the latest from Felt Mistress (and to see if she coughs up any of those highly guarded secrets!), you can happily follow along with her blog or flickr stream. I know I will!

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Posted by Stephan Britt on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 5 comments
Tags: blog, Crafts, dolls, Felt Mistress, Flickr, John Allison, jon burgerman, Jon Knox, Jonathan Edwards, Louise Evans, plush

May 24, 2010 09:22 AM

Joy Ang shares her illustration process for the cover of the beautiful new Anthology project book.

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Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 12 comments
Tags: anthology, Books, Joy Ang

May 23, 2010 06:09 PM

There are tributes to Wayne Boring and Carl Barks in there.

May 23, 2010 04:26 PM

May 22, 2010 11:40 PM

I don't have time to put up a well-thought out post, but I think I can manage a long post.....I mean a really, really LOOOOOOOOONG post! I imagine the girl's feet (above) are interfering with my sidebar graphics, but I don't think any of my male readers will complain.

Boy, this new beta Blogger format is liberating! You can stretch across the page with it. I expect to do a lot of articles about impossibly long snakes, trains, sleeping Watusis and Diplodicus-type dinosaurs.

Above, one of my favorite widescreen movie posters.  Now I get to display it in a format that supports it.

Ah, these are heady days! Thank-you Blogger! I can't believe that all this is free!

May 22, 2010 06:17 PM

continued from:http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2010/05/heartaches-pilot-12-unkind-fate.html

May 21, 2010 11:51 PM

I thought of an extra gag for that last post

May 21, 2010 10:51 PM